Transfiguration

Sermon Notes 19th February 2023
Doug Bannerman

Exodus 24.12-18  Matthew 17.1-9

 And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun,
and his clothes became dazzling white. (Matthew 17.2)

I wonder if you can imagine what it would be like to truly experience the kind of relationships that exist within the Holy Trinity, the most succinct expression of which is “I and the Father are one” (John 10.30). A close parallel is a mutual state of being “in Love”. As Freud would have it, ego boundaries dissolve, and the couple can sit for hours on a riverbank on a balmy summer’s day without speaking a word, and they experience a blissful sense of communion, of one-ness.

Now, I have long wondered who, in reality, was transfigured. Was it Jesus? Was it Peter, James and John? Was it all of them?

In my mind, there is an issue of translation, and another issue to do with perception, the way we see things, our points of view, our perspectives, and our unconscious assumptions and biases, not the least of which is to think in dualistic terms – as if there is no other way of thinking or being. This is not, by the way a fault in our make-up. Human beings are born with brains hard wired to think in terms of black or white, good or bad, and so on. It provides a means of comparing this and that, an early learning mechanism.

But it means that the language meanings we learn and use are also dualistic. On the other hand, the mind-set of pretty well all the Wisdom traditions in the world is characterised by so-called unitive thinking and states of being.

The Wisdom traditions encompass both kinds of perception and being. In our mythology for example, the Garden of Eden is place of unity, non-duality, non-duality of male and female, non-duality of human and God, non-duality of good and evil. All is one, and duality cannot exist in the Garden. So, to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil excludes the man and the woman from that unitive state of being in which they were one. But that is not the whole story; there is another tree in the garden, the tree of immortal life (Genesis 2.9), and the Christ figure on the second tree in the Garden is the fruit of the tree of immortal life, when you know that “I and the Father are one”.

As Joseph Campbell succinctly put it, “You have to have a balance between death and life, the two aspects of the same thing which is being-becoming”.[1]

The Lady Julian of Norwich knew this as a fundamental truth. In her Revelations of Divine Love, she wrote “The soul is preciously knitted to Him [Jesus] in its making by a knot so subtle and so mighty that it is oned with God. In this oneing, it is endlessly holy.”[2]

Matthew tells us that Jesus’ face “shone like the sun”, which seems to be an echo of the second time Moses come down Mount Sinai carrying the “Ten Better Ways” (Exodus 34.29). That account says that Moses’ face was shining; but the Hebrew word thus translated is קָרַן qaran (kaw-ran'), meaning to send out rays. Perhaps Matthew’s expression “his face shone like the sun” is coloured by his knowledge of the Book of Exodus?

All this leads me to think that it was Peter, James and John who were transfigured to a brief state of unitive thinking and being, which enabled them to perceive the reality of Jesus’ being, what Campbell called “being-becoming” and the Lady Julian called “oneing”. And I am willing to bet that Jesus had been teaching them how to meditate according to one of the contemplative practices of his day. What else would they be doing up in a mountain – playing tiddlywinks?

The Wisdom traditions of all the major religions aspire to a unitive state of being. Unfortunately, the Christian Wisdom tradition was all but snuffed out in the third century when our canon of scripture was effectively set in concrete. In essence contemporaneous Wisdom writings were deemed to be heretical.

Nevertheless, the spirit of Wisdom writing was preserved by divines like Lady Julian of Norwich, the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Hildegarde of Bingen, Nicolas of Cusa, and Meister Eckhart, to name but a few. And it is alive and well today in both the secular and religious realms.

In 1982, neurologist and Zen practitioner James Austin felt a “sense of enlightenment” unlike anything he had ever experienced. His sense of individual existence, of separation from the physical world, evaporated like morning mist. He saw things "as they really are". The sense of "I, me, mine" disappeared. His old yearnings, loathings, fear of death and insinuations of selfhood vanished. “I had been graced,” he said “by a comprehension of the ultimate nature of things."[3] his experience spurred his subsequent research during which he discovered that the so-called “orientation association area” of the brain[4] processes information about space and time, and about the orientation of the body in space. It also determines where the body ends and the rest of the world begins. Significantly the intense concentration of meditation blocks sensory inputs to this part of the brain. With no information from the senses arriving, the orientation area cannot find any boundary between the self and the world. And so, the brain seems to have no choice but "to perceive the self as endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything", a feeling of infinite space.[5]

Likewise intense prayer, uplifting ritual or liturgy, sacred music, drumming, dancing, incantations and chanting can all soften the boundaries of the self, giving rise to a sense of oneness and spiritual unity. Slow chanting, soft liturgical melodies and whispered ritualistic prayer all seem to work their magic in much the same way: they turn on the hippocampus directly and block neuronal traffic to some brain regions.

So, science informs us that when we have this experience of unitary states, we are not going mad. It does, however, seem to beg the question of how valid our spiritual experience is. But that, really, is more a matter of faith. Personally, I believe that God created my brain wiring, not the other way around.

The drawcard is the state of being in which all is one, and countless people are drawn to find their way there in the course of their spiritual journey. Whether one is Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or Atheist or Hindu or Animist – these matter not. Every human being on this planet is, willy-nilly, on a spiritual journey of one sort or another.

T S Eliot’s Four Quartets express this theme with compelling clarity. The poem is a faith journey in itself, beginning with an introduction to beauty – a sumptuous, ecstatic, innocent, erotic beauty discovered in the rose garden of Burnt Norton.[6]

Evocative images of wholeness dominate the opening sequence. The hopeful, almost palpable presence of roses merges with impressions of a rising lotus plant, an abrupt influx of sunlight, the song of the thrush, and overtones of unheard music. But along the way, Eliot also traverses sites of disaffection, deprivation, doubt and darkness.

Little Gidding, the last poem of the sequence (my favourite), is steeped in experiences of strife and affliction.[7] But this is tempered by a sublime vision of divine love, which transfigures previous impressions of the rose, and likewise transfigures images of dissolution into Pentecostal flame.

Eliot masterfully illuminates the spiritual link between apparent opposites, between fire and rose, an “impossible union of spheres.” And so, he says, “We shall not cease from exploration,” enticing us toward the idea of spiritual journey, continuous development, creation in process, little steps, rather than searching vainly for that one pearl of great price, the overpowering moment, the epiphany to end all epiphanies.

And, leaning a little on the Lady Julian of Norwich, he concludes:

 With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always –

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

Doug Bannerman © 2023

[1] See Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers “The Power of Myth”, Episode 4.

[1] Chapter 53 of Revelations of Divine Love

[1] Sharon Begley “Religion And The Brain” 5/6/01 at 8.00pm EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/religion-and-brain-152895

[1] A bundle of neurons in the superior parietal lobe

[1] Ibid

[1] John Gatta The Transfiguration of Christ and Creation (Eugene, Oregon: WIFP & STOCK 2011) [1] Ibi