Now that T-Fig is a mere 10 days away, it’s time to get serious. What are you thinking for transfiguration this year? What phrases do you want to start working with? What seeds are you hoping will bud into new liturgy? What fig-ments (hahaha) do you want to build on?
I know, I know, it’s still only the 11th day of Christmas, but some of us have to work really far ahead. Whether it’s because we have a lot of volunteers involved and they need more time to create, or we’re trying hard to do new creative things that always somehow seem to require more work, or our brains just need the lead time to let things simmer, it’s time to look forward in faith…toward everyone’s favorite holy day, Transfiguration. Every year, the same story of the shiny Jesus and the whole Moses-Elijah-crazy-Peter-dwellings-falling-on-our-faces-overshadowed-by-clouds-voice-from-the-sky thing. So…what are you thinking about for T-Fig? How can we experience the holy in this story this year? What creative ways–music, liturgy, movement, art, etc–can help us encounter God on this Sunday before Lent?
I am thinking about how to use the imagery of “dazzling” and “overshadowed”…not sure yet how to work it, but thinking of something about a confession naming how we let the dazzling overshadow rather than the voice of god overshadow. or something. I’d love thoughts or further phrases playing with those words!
The hymn “Swiftly Pass the Clouds of Glory” uses that “dazzling” language – it’s one of my favorites. But what does that dazzling-ness become when we come down from the mountain? How dingy we let our lives become even when we have a glimpse of such glory! The third verse of that hymn does some wonderful things with the language on these matters and has some great phrases that might help:
Lord, transfigure our perception
With the purest light that shines,
And recast our life’s intentions
To the shape of your designs,
Till we seek no other glory
Than what lies past Calvary’s hill
And our living and our dying
And our rising by your will.
I always get sucked in to the Peter and the disciples’ response to all this. They have this tendency to come across as bumbling idiots (especially in Mark), and Peter is at his finest here – even though he is probably just unsettled about what he is seeing as much as anything. How often do we let our unsettledness get in our way of seeing God or taking in the importance of a holy moment?