Thoughts about Lent, etc.
Gosh, it's been awhile. I think I am going to try to post things I think as I think them -- just get my meditations out there before I forget I ever had them.
Sunday was the Transfiguration, and it occurred to me in church while hearing the reading that the Transfiguration has always been one of those things for me. When I was nine or ten and trying to take up the practice of our religion as best I understood how (this was the period of time during which I once tried to get my family to use Oreos and water for home Communion, as we had no matzah or grape juice), I decided to read my way all the way through the New Testament (I ended up getting bogged down in Acts). There were a few things in the Gospel story that I just didn't understand, and the Transfiguration was one of them. Oh, I understood the words, and their import: but I couldn't explain to myself why I felt shut out of the meaning. How complicated could it be, I wondered? Jesus and his favorite three disciples go up a mountain, and Jesus is "transfigured" -- suddenly wearing white, and conversing with Moses and Elijah, and God speaks; and then the glory drops away and the three Galileans are babbling and silent by turns. What was so hard to understand about that?
But I continued to tell myself that I didn't understand it, because I knew that that story spoke to something that was other than what I knew about life with God.
It was interesting, in passing, to encounter the word (with a capital letter, too!) in the Harry Potter books, meaning the magical science of changing one thing into another, or making it disappear or appear. Was that analogous to what happened on the mountain with Jesus? Obviously miracle was involved somehow. Was it just too simple for subtle people to get? Was it one of those things Paul talked about that shames the eggheads while speaking to the simple? Was the significance of Jesus's clothes turning "a whiter hue than white" in Jean Rhys's phrase and the appearance of Moses and Elijah and the voice of God, was the significance of all that just too obvious for me?
Occasionally I wondered if not grasping it meant I didn't believe it, and therefore wasn't really a part of Jesus' family. But belief and apprehension seem to be different things to me and I never did feel a complete terror of possibly not being acceptable because of the way my mind worked -- or didn't work. In any case, I put away the Transfiguration on a small shelf of the things I couldn't mur up in comprehending words -- my first experience with the death of a friend being one of its fellows, for example -- and went on with life.
I still don't "understand" the Transfiguration, but I'm glad we celebrate it and talk about it once a year. Perhaps some time Jesus will reveal me my own mystery, like that white stone with our secret name on it in Revelation.
Meanwhile Lent has come: today I had ashes put on my head and heard the words, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." It has always been a great comfort to hear that line from Psalm 51: "He remembers that we are dust." He remembers, even if we forget and get perfectionistically above ourselves. There seems to me to be a lot of knowledges that God carries for us this way, and Lent seems like a season in which God lets them down for us, simple, unadorned, unveiled, immutable, without the fug of our rushing about and anticipating this, that, and the other. On the Sunday of the Transfiguration, reading the Ash Wednesday service in my pew, anticipating, I almost had tears at the words. "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." All the things I have in my life to grieve over, the "if onlys" and the losses -- that is dust, and the things I try to make out of my life, those are dust too. They are the same. It's comforting because for a moment I can think, not that my positive attributes and actions are as mutable and fleeting as my body, but that my negative actions and attributes are just as dusty as everything else I will ever lose. For a moment, I can let go.
There are things I don't understand, but I don't have to understand to be grateful, which is a blessing.
Gosh, it's been awhile. I think I am going to try to post things I think as I think them -- just get my meditations out there before I forget I ever had them.
Sunday was the Transfiguration, and it occurred to me in church while hearing the reading that the Transfiguration has always been one of those things for me. When I was nine or ten and trying to take up the practice of our religion as best I understood how (this was the period of time during which I once tried to get my family to use Oreos and water for home Communion, as we had no matzah or grape juice), I decided to read my way all the way through the New Testament (I ended up getting bogged down in Acts). There were a few things in the Gospel story that I just didn't understand, and the Transfiguration was one of them. Oh, I understood the words, and their import: but I couldn't explain to myself why I felt shut out of the meaning. How complicated could it be, I wondered? Jesus and his favorite three disciples go up a mountain, and Jesus is "transfigured" -- suddenly wearing white, and conversing with Moses and Elijah, and God speaks; and then the glory drops away and the three Galileans are babbling and silent by turns. What was so hard to understand about that?
But I continued to tell myself that I didn't understand it, because I knew that that story spoke to something that was other than what I knew about life with God.
It was interesting, in passing, to encounter the word (with a capital letter, too!) in the Harry Potter books, meaning the magical science of changing one thing into another, or making it disappear or appear. Was that analogous to what happened on the mountain with Jesus? Obviously miracle was involved somehow. Was it just too simple for subtle people to get? Was it one of those things Paul talked about that shames the eggheads while speaking to the simple? Was the significance of Jesus's clothes turning "a whiter hue than white" in Jean Rhys's phrase and the appearance of Moses and Elijah and the voice of God, was the significance of all that just too obvious for me?
Occasionally I wondered if not grasping it meant I didn't believe it, and therefore wasn't really a part of Jesus' family. But belief and apprehension seem to be different things to me and I never did feel a complete terror of possibly not being acceptable because of the way my mind worked -- or didn't work. In any case, I put away the Transfiguration on a small shelf of the things I couldn't mur up in comprehending words -- my first experience with the death of a friend being one of its fellows, for example -- and went on with life.
I still don't "understand" the Transfiguration, but I'm glad we celebrate it and talk about it once a year. Perhaps some time Jesus will reveal me my own mystery, like that white stone with our secret name on it in Revelation.
Meanwhile Lent has come: today I had ashes put on my head and heard the words, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." It has always been a great comfort to hear that line from Psalm 51: "He remembers that we are dust." He remembers, even if we forget and get perfectionistically above ourselves. There seems to me to be a lot of knowledges that God carries for us this way, and Lent seems like a season in which God lets them down for us, simple, unadorned, unveiled, immutable, without the fug of our rushing about and anticipating this, that, and the other. On the Sunday of the Transfiguration, reading the Ash Wednesday service in my pew, anticipating, I almost had tears at the words. "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." All the things I have in my life to grieve over, the "if onlys" and the losses -- that is dust, and the things I try to make out of my life, those are dust too. They are the same. It's comforting because for a moment I can think, not that my positive attributes and actions are as mutable and fleeting as my body, but that my negative actions and attributes are just as dusty as everything else I will ever lose. For a moment, I can let go.
There are things I don't understand, but I don't have to understand to be grateful, which is a blessing.
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