Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles tagged with Transfiguration

The Light of Christ in an Earthen Vessel: in Memory of Thomas Levergood, 1962-2021

I met Thomas at a graduate student party at the University of Chicago in 1994. I’ve never forgotten his first two questions to me. He began with, “Aren’t you the cantor at St. Thomas [the Apostle parish]?” When I replied in the affirmative, he immediately followed that up with, “Have you ever thought of being a priest?” I hadn’t…

“Le Barberousse” [Redbeard] as he was fondly known by Hyde Park francophones.

So began an intense three-year period of our friendship, during which we toured around virtually every men’s religious community in the Archdiocese and spoke, often with greater zeal than discernment, about the mystical life, Church history, founding our own monastery, etc. I had never before had such intellectually gratifying discussions about faith. Our great shared passion was mysticism, though as we walked this path together, he tended toward the Carmelite tradition and I toward the Desert Fathers. He and I would end up working at the monastery I eventually joined, helping out with cleaning the guesthouse and maintaining the grounds. It was during this time that he conceived the idea for a “Catholic think tank” at the university. Just before I entered monastic life, I was able to help out at some of the first meetings of what would become the Lumen Christi Institute.

As anyone who knew Thomas can attest, his was a most fecund mind. Some years later, I visited him at Calvert House, at what was serving as his office for Lumen Christi. He told me that some corporate leadership guru had given him advice to engage in “one act of creative destruction at the beginning of each day.” I think that the idea was to avoid procrastination by characterizing a difficult phone call as a challenge rather than as an existential crisis. The advice struck me as slightly absurd on his lips. He needed little encouragement for initiating new projects! The difficulty was always about finding adequate help. Thanks be to God, he managed, through many years of dogged work and with much competent assistance, to build up an impressive group of board members and staff who will carry on his vision.

Lumen Christi came to be so identified with Thomas that it is easy to forget just how multitalented he was. When we met, he was, among other things, contemplating becoming a poet, becoming a priest, and running political campaigns. Lest we forget, he was ostensibly working on a PhD. as a student in the prestigious Committee on Social Thought, that quirkiest program at the quirky university that he and I both loved. Most of his ideas were serious, but his imagination allowed for plenty of oddball humor, too. He once suggested that I compose a country song cycle on the ecumenical councils and even offered a melody for “Good Pope Leo and His Tome.”

Friends of Thomas will also attest that he was a complex person. His impressive resume made it easy to overlook the many obstacles he encountered throughout life. If mysticism had been our shared passion in the early years, I believe that the Incarnation became the firmer foundation for our shared reflections as we grew older. Age has a way of bringing home the limitations of our bodily existence, all the better, one hopes, to hand the reins to Christ.

These memories have been flooding my mind in recent weeks as, during his final illness, Thomas and I were able to spend more time together than we had in many years. My first thought, on hearing that he had died yesterday was that Christ had chosen the Feast of the Transfiguration as the day to call him home. It was a mystery that Thomas greatly revered. This is the day on which we are dazzled by the Uncreated Light somehow–improbably–shining through our lowly human body. What a triumphant hope this breeds in those who know its secret! Our frail human nature is absolutely no obstacle to the purifying and transforming Light of Christ. May God in His mercy send the angels to receive him, that his eyes may be opened anew to the deifying light. Rest in peace.

The Transfiguration as Divine Enchantment

“Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain.”–Proverbs 31: 30a

“Through delight in the beauty of these things they assumed them to be gods.”–Wisdom 13: 3

His face shone like the sun.

As I develop the theme of beauty as a revelation of God, it is important to offer some clear theological foundations. Providentially, the Church has provided exactly the right Mystery for this task today, the Feast of the Transfiguration. Let me take this opportunity to name the themes I intend to convey in the coming posts, and how they are explained by the Transfiguration. As the two opening quotes attest, the Bible gives us an ambiguous presentation of beauty. Beauty seduces when misappropriated. The Church’s tradition also teaches that it conduces to holiness, under the right circumstances.

Beauty is Incarnate. God clothes Himself in a body, but this body is precisely what conveys to Peter, James, and John the splendid divinity of the wearer. God communicates through physical signs, and manifests Himself in the material world, as He did in the pillar of cloud and fire.

Beauty is both lucid and opaque. “A bright cloud overshadowed them [Matthew 17: 5].” This image is paradoxical; the cloud is apparently a bright shadow. It is parallel to the sign of God’s presence at the crucial moment of the Exodus: “the Lord in the pillar of fire and of cloud looked down upon the host of the Egyptians [Exodus 14: 24].” This paradox is connected to the “cascade of mysteries” to which I referred in my opening post. Just when a beautiful object seems crystal-clear, it can suddenly appear strange.

Beauty gives us hope by revealing God’s nearness and His ultimate triumph. In a seventh-century homily, Saint Anastasius of Sinai writes, “It was as if [the Lord] said to them, ‘As time goes by you may be in danger of losing your faith.’” To save us from this, the Lord revealed His glory on Mount Tabor. Through the gift of the Holy Spirit, we are now able to hear (or read) all languages–including the language of creation, the natural world–in our own vernacular. “The Lord is at hand! Have no anxiety about anything [Philippians 4: 5-6].”

Beauty gives us hope by revealing our destiny of glory. “Our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body [Philippians 3: 20-21].” The Transfiguration is a foreshadowing of what will happen to our bodies, and the bodies of all creatures, when God becomes all in all [cf. 1 Corinthians 15: 21], and “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the water covers the sea [Habakkuk 2: 14].”

Beauty demands a moral response. “Jesus came and touched them, saying, ‘Rise, and have no fear [Matthew 17: 7].’” The Apostles had fallen, death-like, on their faces, aware of their smallness beside God’s glory, but the Lord commands them to rise and to continue on their way with Him.

Saint John of the Cross, one of the great poets of the Spanish language, possessed a delicate sense of beauty. He grew in sanctity and earned that sense of beauty through an eight month ordeal of solitary confinement.

Our glorious destiny is by the Way of the Cross. Jesus commands them not to tell anyone what they have seen until the Son of Man is raised from the dead. The full realization of the Transfiguration is reserved for the Resurrection [N.B. Jesus’s appearance after the Resurrection is often “opaque”!]. Beauty is apt to be misunderstood and misappropriated if we desire it without renunciation.

We will recognize the true beauty in all creatures to the extent that our moral response to beauty is a cruciform renunciation. This summarizes the last few points, and it adds one last dimension. It is true that beauty can be seductive, and therefore poses a spiritual danger to us. We can combat this danger by renunciation. There are various ways of going about this. Saint John of the Cross gives us a rule of thumb: if we encounter something beautiful and immediately think of God, it’s safe. Otherwise, we probably need to grow in the virtue of temperance, and specifically in the subvirtue of chastity. By meditation on the Cross, we can learn to be detached from all creatures. The reward of this detachment is that we will come to see all creatures no longer as material for us to possess and manipulate, but as sacraments of God’s presence.

The Transfiguration

“He did not know what to say, for they were exceedingly afraid [Mark 9: 5].” With this little detail, Saint Mark reveals quite a bit about the character of Saint Peter and the human condition in general. Under normal circumstances, we are unprepared to behold the full glory of God, and when suddenly God’s grandeur “flame[s] out, like shining from shook foil,”  it can be a terrifying, disorienting experience.

We have many testimonies of this encounter. One early, telling encounter was that of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah was a priest and probably had entered God’s temple countless times to offer sacrifice. One day, he suddenly saw in reality what he had been celebrating in shadowy, symbolic ways. “I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up….And I said, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips…for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts [Isaiah 6: 1, 5]!” Isaiah is rendered voluntarily speechless until his lips are cleansed by a coal from the altar.

Similarly, Saint Thomas Aquinas, toward the end of his earthly life, was celebrating the Eucharist as he had many times before. This time was different. Like Isaiah, he glimpsed something of the reality that he had celebrated in the half-veil of sacramental mystery. The author of the Summa Theologica, perhaps the greatest intellectual achievement of all time, wrote no more after this, leaving the Summa unfinished. “All that I have written seems as so much straw,” he confided to a friend.

Saint Peter suffers no such scruples. Beholding Christ transfigured, he was properly afraid. Not knowing what to say, however, he said whatever came to mind. In this, he seems to be of a kindred mindset to modern man. Is it not the case that our incessant talking, the swarming proliferation of words, is so much nervous chatter to cover over our anxiety and alienation? We hardly know what to say, yet we can’t stop talking. In our case, I suspect that silence doesn’t occur to us because our fear is not the result of an encounter with the living God, but with the dreadful possibility of His utter absence.

I began by saying that we are not normally prepared to meet God in the unmitigated power of His limitless Being. What the Transfiguration begins to teach us is that, under the dispensation of grace, in the afterglow of the Resurrection and Pentecost, we live under a “new normal.” We live in the in-between time, the time of the holy Liturgy, after the shadows of animal sacrifice but not yet at the full consummation of the world. The Kingdom of God is breaking into the world that itself is passing away. The baptized, as God’s adopted children, are being trained to “see [God] as He is [1 John 3: 2].” The training of our senses and their elevation to the spiritual realm takes place in the liturgy.

This past June, we were blessed to be able to unveil our two newest icons, the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, flanking the Mother of God and John the Baptist. Gradually, our sanctuary is being populated with the communion of the saints. Icons are not mere representations of model believers. The iconographer truly receives the image from the inbreaking realm of heaven. Iconography is, therefore, an ascetical craft, a discipline of visual listening and receptivity, a training of the interior vision to see beyond the sacramental into the reality of God’s holy court. At the same time, icons train the worshipper to attune his or her senses to this new reality. The icons are a central part of the liturgical act, and as conduits of grace, help to elevate the sense of sight to its proper spiritual register.

Similarly, sacred music is much more than pleasing ornamentation of holy words. As Kevin Allen and I have discussed at various time in our decade of collaboration, the composer of sacred music must, like the iconographer, exercise a discipline of spiritual listening. The aim is, through purification of hearing, to catch something of the overwhelming beauty of the perpetual song of heaven. At Solemn Vespers this coming Saturday evening (August 5, 5:15 p.m.), the First Vespers of the feast of the Transfiguration, Kevin and I humbly offer two new motets in this spirit. We pray that our double motet will be a similar conduit of grace, to prepare our hearts to hear God’s Word in its fullest transformative power.