Have you had your 4th and Walnut moment?

We can spot the Olympian who has just nailed their performance.  We know a friend of ours has fallen in love before we are told. We are aware someone we care about has become a father or mother before that person tells us. They are radiant with an inner glory that is just dazzling to behold. It just shows.  

   The scriptures would call these moments a kind of theophany (with a small “t”).  Experiences where the veil is pulled aside and we see the deepest reality that is at the heart of everything.  We glimpse the reflected glory of God himself.  Have you known those moments in your own life or in the life of a friend?  Sometimes they happen in those Olympian moments when it all comes together.  Other times, it comes right in the middle of our ordinary lives.  Have you had those moments when God suddenly ‘bursts’ through the ordinariness of your/their life, and suddenly, you see, you feel, you know, you are TRANSFORMED by the experience? 

   A young Thomas Merton, who was a monk who lived in Gethsemane, KY, was sent by his abbot to run an errand to ‘the big city.’  He writes of that simple errand this way.  “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people – that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another, even though we were total strangers.  I knew that I shared with them this glorious destiny of being a member of the human race, a race in which God himself became incarnate.  Notice how ordinary the moment was – in the middle of a shopping trip on the corner of 4th and Walnut.  It is like saying: On the corner of Nattie Bridge and Clearview – God just showed up.  But that is exactly what happened to the young monk. 

   Merton continues: “If only everybody could realize this!  It cannot be explained, only experienced.  There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”   

   That’s what happened to Peter, James and John, as they spent time with their friend upon the mountain. Luke tells us:  “While Jesus was praying, his face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white." In a moment of profound prayer, a moment of intimacy with God the Father, a moment when Jesus became more fully aware of what "he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem," Jesus is changed. The joy, the glory, the love, the understanding that touched the heart and soul of Jesus burst forth and was seen by his apostles. How could the appearance, the expression, the bearing of Jesus remain untouched by what he experienced on the mountain?

   And you, do you believe that at the deepest part of your being, “you are all walking around shining like the sun.”  Sure, we all screw up, all make mistakes, all sin and fail and fall miserably upon our faces.  But the deepest truth is that we share the glory that Jesus shared as the chosen of God.  Again, in Merton’s words:  We are like “a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven, and if we could see it, we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.´    

   That is what the transfiguration reveals to us about Jesus.  And in that moment on the mountain, OUR destiny is revealed.  We, too, are God’s beloved.  When we go "up the mountain to pray," when we are open to the presence and goodness of God in our life, we are changed for the better and that change can be seen in us. When God comes into our life, nothing about us remains the same.  

As the Olympics come to a close tonight, and we’ll see that montage of the great moments and the painful ones and all the ones in between,  and we’ll be invited to trust the glory that we get a glimpse of in those athletes is a glimpse of the glory the disciples saw upon that mountain, and what Merton saw at the corner of 4th and Walnut.  Live this week, and for the rest of your lives trusting in that great theophany of Thomas Merton.  Live believing that you: “are always walking around shining like the sun!”