The lovely passage in our 2nd Reading today (2 Peter 1:16-19) of “A lamp lighting a way through the dark” takes me back to the fears of my childhood.
You can see and hear me give this Homily on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLj7bR8A5bA
I remember, back then, how frightened I was of the dark, insisting that my curtains were left open so that the light from the street lamp gave me some comfort. I lived in a long suburban London road with lots of large trees, which meant that there were big areas of darkness between each lamp post; so I would stand under one lamp plucking up the courage to run through the frightening darkness to the safety of the next one. I still remember the day when as a teenager I wasn’t frightened any more. I wondered for a moment why, and then realised that it was because I now knew that Jesus was with me, and so I was safe. You see before that I’d thought Jesus was not real, just a fairy story, but now people had shared with me that he was actually not only a real historical figure but also, in some mysterious way, was with each of us in the present. Now I had been given faith.
Of course, the fear I’d experienced was in my mind, because it was a very respectable part of 1950’s south London where there were no real dangers; but it didn’t make it any less frightening. At night I would turn away from the darkness, hiding as much of my head as possible under the covers; and the idea that one day I would be able to stand fearlessly in the darkness was just impossible to imagine. Indeed, typical of me, once I had faith I went from one extreme to the other; and whilst some people who can cope with the dark are still fearful of graveyards, I scorned such fear and walked boldly through the midst of the graves. I’d learnt, like Daniel in our 1st Reading (Daniel 7:9-14) that I can stand and gaze “Into the visions of the night”, and find God.
This idea is taken much further in the teaching of St John of the Cross on prayer. He spent 8 months imprisoned by his fellow monks who did not like the reforms he was promoting with the encouragement of St Teresa of Avila. So they kept him under a brutal regime that included public lashings at least weekly, and severe isolation in a tiny stifling cell measuring barely 10 feet by 6 feet, where he rarely had a lamp. Yet from this experience came his great work on the Dark Night of the Soul. He writes “The soul makes greater progress when it least thinks so, yes most frequently when it imagines that it is losing. The soul makes greater progress when it travels in the dark.”
I was listening on the Radio the other day to John McCarthy who was talking of his time in years of endless darkness whilst a prisoner in Lebanon; and how on one desperate day he had cried out in his utter despair “God help me”; and to his surprise found that this made a difference. What he explained was that he did not really believe in God, and so had now realised that the transformation that happened to him, with its reference to God, was actually a psychological process, and didn’t mean that there actually was a God who helped him. Atheists would say the same about my teenage experience, wouldn’t they? But I think they all make the same basic mistake, for they assume that if we can explain something scientifically it cannot be the work of God. My response is to say that surely this is the way God most normally works, for since God created the natural world including our human minds how else would such work take place? The idea that God intervenes to change the natural processes he has made seems very odd to me!
So, whenever I see some great natural event, from a waterfall to a glorious sunset, I marvel before the glory of God that is revealed in such things. However, when those three disciples see the glory of God in Jesus transfigured, as described in our Gospel, (Matt 17:1-9) they do not just marvel at the glory of God but “Fall on their faces, overcome with fear.” It is a natural response. But notice what Jesus does. He touches them, and says “Stand up. Do not be afraid.” He is not saying that we should not have a holy fear of God for that is natural, but he wants to teach us that as his followers we are called into a different status in our relationship with God, and thus can stand before God with confidence. This is made clear by the fact that he has just been seen in glory with Moses and Elijah. Now we might think that when they found themselves in the presence of God they fell on their faces, but not so, for both are described as standing before the glory of God; Moses when he meets God in the burning bush, (Exodus 3:1-5) and later on the mountain at the time of the giving of the 10 Commandments ; and Elijah who stands when he calls down fire from heaven (1 Kings 18:39) and later when he too is face to face with the glory of God, in his case in the still small voice as we will hear next Sunday.
(1 Kings 19:13)
Nonetheless the idea that we might be like Moses and Elijah and stand before the glory of God is a difficult one to take in isn’t it, because when we are close to the glory of God. we are surely more aware how dark is the darkness in which we are standing in contrast to God who is all light; and once we realise this how can we stand? But of course, even though we are in the dark, we stand, because Jesus who is our light is with us and tells us to. With him and in him, we are called into the company of Moses and Elijah at the moments when they saw the glory of God. So we do not stand alone, we stand with them, and then we can do what we are told to do in the Letter to the Hebrews (4:16) “With confidence draw near to the throne of grace.”
Yes, it is very understandable that we Christians tend to revert to thinking that when we pray, we must always kneel before God, for it is the natural response, and indeed kneeling can be appropriate at certain times. But the Transfiguration teaches us that we Christians are called to stand, and so at every Mass after kneeling for the Consecration, we stand to say the Our Father together, for we are God’s holy people. We stand in the company of God, because Jesus told us to.
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