Dear Friends,
What is something that changed you?
As we enter this last Sunday before the beginning of Lent, we are faced with Saint Mark’s account of the Transfiguration. Mark’s is perhaps the least detailed iteration of the event, making the already perplexing scene even less transparent. And yet, as the passage ends, it is clear that something extraordinary has happened. Jesus has been transfigured. Peter, James, & John have been, in their hearts and minds, transformed.
To say that we are changed can mean something big or small. In the last few weeks, for example, I have been observing just how much pain I was in before having surgery in early January. My spine was a source of significant, quality of life reducing pain. And, while putting hardware in one’s spine is hardly a modest intervention, it has meaningfully changed my daily life. But I wouldn’t say it has changed me.
It’s a fine distinction, this way of talking about change. Certain things about disability have certainly changed me. It makes me wonder about the metaphors and stories we use to grapple with this idea.
The Extraordinary Nature Of Change
When I think about how we talk about change with children, the first, admittedly trite, example that comes to mind, is the example of the caterpillar that becomes a butterfly. Outwardly, this is a clear and elegant example of change. But I’m also a big fan of Eric Carle, and so thinking about this classic model of change leads me to ponder The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
When the Very Hungry Caterpillar became the (Seemingly-Not-So-Hungry) Butterfly, had the Caterpillar really changed in the deepest sense? We have no real reason to think so. But then think of the Velveteen Rabbit. The Velveteen Rabbit, alongside the other most beloved toys, are transformed. They become REAL.
As Margery Williams, author of The Velveteen Rabbit puts it, “Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you,”
That, I think, is the nature of the Transfiguration as a sacred event. And it’s also the best description of the deepest moments of change in our own lives.
So, to return to the question I began with: what is something that changed you? Not like the Very Hungry Caterpillar was changed, but like how the Velveteen Rabbit became real.
In my own life, I can recognize that I was changed not by marriage (the ring and the last name notwithstanding), but in the slow work of creating that relationship in the years that came before it. I was not changed in any one moment of my life in the church, but by my experience of being ministered to and ministering to others. I was not changed by any particular moment in my education, as much as by piecing together different aspects of my interests and passions into a life.
And Jesus is transfigured by his place in lineage, in narrative, and through His unique location and relationship within the Trinity. All of that is evident in this story: Elijah and Moses, essential prophets whose lives informed how we would understand Jesus, appear beside him. A voice from heaven breaks through the moment, naming that sacred relationship. The Transfiguration, then, is the outward demonstration of something that cannot be captured in any single moment. Much as has been said about miracles, the point is not the miracle. It is how the performance of the miracle shapes those who witness it.
We don’t get to see Jesus transfigured on that hillside, but hopefully we don’t need to. In keeping with my year of reading the Luther devotional “Day By Day We Magnify Thee,” may we recall the greatest miracles: that the earth continues to spin, the sun rise and set, the seasons come and go, plants spring up and baby animals are born. A single “work” recorded like turning water into wine is not so great a thing, but that each day we are given a chance to participate in caring for this world and each other, that we are loved and forgiven – these are the real miracles and the ones that offer us a chance for our own transfiguration.
Peace,
Bird