What our church calls “the season after the Epiphany” comes to a conclusion this Sunday, and next Sunday we’ll enter into the deeply reflective season of Lent. This morning’s readings, in the spirit of all things Epiphany—whose season is all about the revealing of Christ’s identity—include two stories of awe-inspiring mountain events. One is about Moses’ encounter with God on Mt. Sinai, from which he returns with a face so bright that nobody can bear to look upon it. The other is about Jesus and his disciples on Mt. Tabor, where the prophets Moses and Elijah appear in brilliant light.
It’s from stories like these that we get the metaphor of “mountaintop experience” to describe a particularly impactful spiritual encounter. And that’s not just a contemporary pop-spirituality expression: throughout the Bible, mountains are the places where God is revealed. And what better location than a mountaintop from which to peer down into the canyon of our Lenten discontent—which begins this very Wednesday—and take a kind of long view of the spiritual life.
Belden Lane, author of The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, describes Christian spiritual growth as a journey from desert to mountain to cloud. Of course he’s borrowing from the geography of the Exodus, and the mountain above the Sinai desert where Moses guided the recalcitrant Hebrews for forty-some years. What mystics call the purgative way—that is, the process of letting go of the old in order to be open to a new relationship with God—is symbolized by the desert. It’s an inner and outer landscape wherein people learn to travel lightly, consume minimally, and listen deeply.
The mountain, which the ancient Hebrews and Jesus’ disciples arrived at by way of desert sojourn, was the real and symbolic place of God’s self-revealing. That’s what Christian mystics would call the illuminative way. It’s how people encounter sacred truth. And even though illumination can happen anywhere and everywhere on earth, it manifests with a kind of clarity and perspective that resembles the view from a mountaintop. The face-shining, clothing-bleaching, transfigurative glory of God does not show up exclusively on mountains and their metaphorical equivalents. But the air is thin there, the visual obstacles and few, and we all know that some settings make it easier to see what’s already all around us. That is, to see what’s hidden in plain sight.
Which brings me to the third movement of spiritual growth: deepening connection to God, which the mystics call it the unitive way. Belden Lane uses the metaphor of the cloud for union with God, an obvious reference to the Transfiguration story we just heard. Recall that after the glorious appearance of Moses and Elijah alongside Jesus, an event which Peter utterly bungles by trying to turn it into a historical landmark, a cloud overtakes Jesus and the disciples. From its misty interior God speaks clearly and audibly. In the cloud metaphor, union with God is not so much about sight—that stunningly clear vision from the mountaintop—but about insight. It is the assurance of God fully present even when unseen: behind the veil of Moses, inside the cloud with Jesus, hidden within the recesses of our hearts.
As you probably know, I’m both the mother and the daughter of astronomers. My dad was something of a rock star in his field, and he spent a lot of time on remote mountaintops where the most powerful telescopes are located. Places like the Atacama Desert in Chile, home of the world’s largest radio telescope. My son Aaron, on the other hand, is more down to earth in his astronomical adventures. Quite literally: he loves to set up his telescopes and do science education in urban venues like downtown Oakland. The view is not as clear, of course, because of the light pollution. But Aaron always reminds me that—if there are stars to be seen—more people will see them from a city street than from a remote mountaintop.
I’ve been thinking a lot about these two approaches to observing the heavens recently, and appreciating how uniquely important both of them are. We need those places—literal and figurative—where the distractions are few and we can focus on the clearest of lights. This Sunday is one of those, in a way: it recalls an event in which the light of Jesus Christ became so utterly clear to Peter and James and John that they knew him, without doubt, in all his glory. And they also recognized the “constellation,” if you will, of the prophets who were his forebears. The spiritual mountaintops of our lives can be like that too. Moments of utter clarity when the glory of God and the belovedness of ourselves is blindingly clear, and we know who and whose we are.
But when I started asking around this past week about what people’s mountaintop spiritual experiences have been, an interesting pattern emerged. Some of them took place on actual mountaintops—on pilgrimage to the Mount of the Transfiguration, even—but far more of them happened in the course of everyday life. At a crowded beach, on a yoga mat, running a marathon, during childbirth, while praying with a dying person. A former parishioner of mine—an immigration lawyer—told me about the transfiguring grace of relationship. With clients in legal jeopardy, with homeless people, with the man who would eventually become his husband, back in the days when it wasn’t so easy for a disabled Latino youth to openly love another young man.
The mountaintop experiences that happen right down in the valleys of life are actually very many, but we may need to look a little harder in order to see them. Like we would, for example, through a telescope set up right in the middle of town. I caught a glimpse of an urban transfiguration last Sunday, I think, when I accompanied our St. Mark’s Trinitarians to the deconsecration of their beloved church.
This was a sorrowful observance, by any measure. How very many epiphanies had been celebrated at St. Mark’s: the kind that we observe liturgically, and also the kind that happen in everyday life. Friendships made, babies baptized, meals shared, parents and spouses buried. And how much we all would have wanted to have built a booth around every one of those sacred moments, or at the very least preserved the church building wherein they occurred. And therein is the irony of the Transfiguration: Jesus wouldn’t let Peter box up the experience, however a spiritual high point it may have been. Instead, what he got was a voice telling him to listen, and the cloudy experience of knowing God, but not knowing what would come next.
St Mark’s friends, Trinity friends, St. Mark’s and First Methodist friends who are now Trinity members: there’s so much we can never know until it happens. I don’t need to tell you that. Who could have imagined the many changes, sad and sweet, of the last two years? Which is why it’s so important to pause and remember the light of the Transfiguration, and of all the mountaintop experiences of our lives. They can show up anywhere, shining God’s truth into both the highs and lows of our ordinary days. We may not be able to keep them in a box or a church, or even in our mortal bodies—material things are woefully impermanent—but we can do like Moses and Peter and Luke and tell each other about it when we see it. I think this is what poet Mary Oliver had in mind when she gave what she called her “Instructions for Living a Life”. Pay attention, she wrote. Be astonished. Tell about it. That’s what those disciples did then, and that’s what we disciples are called to do, even now.
