French theologian Jean Corbon holds the Transfiguration, which we celebrated Wednesday, as a moment of intimate love shared between God the Father and Jesus the Son. Corbon invites us to stand with the group of friends gathered around Jesus as he opens his mind, his heart, his whole being to the Father and then to witness as the Father pours all his being, his life, his love into Jesus his Son. This is a moment of giving and receiving, a moment of letting go and grabbing hold, a moment of laying down and taking up; this is a moment of loving communion. Corbon goes on to describe the light that shines from Jesus as being the love of the Father welling up within him so fully that it cannot be contained.
This moment of bright and intimate love reveals to the friends gathered on that hillside not only who Jesus is, but also who they are. They see another human being, their best friend, physically glowing with divine love. As Jesus is transfigured, they see the fundamental stance and purpose of their humanity – to allow God’s love to well up within, even to the point where it cannot be contained.
These weeks following Pentecost, we have been asking for this gift in a particular way. Praying Eucharistic Prayer C together, we have contextualized our existence and our prayer as a participation in the vast expanse of interstellar space. As the planets continue the rhythm of their orbits, and earth, our island home, joins the chorus, we, as a church family, circle around the altar in prayer and song to seek God where Jesus told us to find him, in the breaking of the bread. In our prayer, we ask for an outpouring of this same love and we seek to open ourselves to receiving and welling up a love so great that it cannot be contained.
And, like Jesus, this love changes us. It transforms us to be more clearly, and maybe even more fully, our truest selves. God’s love stirs us along our personal and communal processes of growth and evolution. As we receive and well up with God’s love, we grow into ourselves more fully and more completely, so that by God’s presence and grace we more fully become who we are meant to be, embodied with a love that cannot be contained.
A surprising thing about this grace-filled transforming love is that it does not fix anything. It’s not like a medicine that silences a symptom or heals a malady. It’s not a cure that removes our troubles or takes away our pain. God is not a magician. God is love. And as such, God pours divine love into us so that we might grow into our truest selves with grace and so that we might embrace all experiences of life with the light of God’s love. After the Transfiguration, Jesus continued his journey to Jerusalem and the cross, but he did so as one who was filled with the love of God. That day on that hillside, Jesus did not receive just solace, he received strength, too. Jesus did not just experience pardon (as his human body glowed with eternal and divine love), he experienced renewal in his spirit, as well. We, too, some 2,000 years later, seek to open ourselves in such a way that we receive solace and strength, pardon and renewal, so that we can follow in the way of Jesus by being most fully ourselves and seeking not that which is easy or comfortable or familiar, but that which is loving, authentic and right. For Jean Corbon, prayer, especially the liturgy, is a wellspring of this outpouring of God’s love. It fills us with a love that fuels our growth into that which we are being created to be – human persons so alive and satiated with God’s love that we, God’s beloved, cannot be contained.