Incarnation Monastery Sunday Homily

A few months ago, a well-known African-American was inspired by a luminous vision for his election campaign, coining a slogan that echoed throughout his nation and the world… and allowed him to win! “We can change. Yes, we can!” or, in others words, we can draw energy from a reliable source within us, that permits us to turn what seems to be an irreversible condition of discontent, into something new, different, shared.

I find that the possibility to modify, to renew, to transcend the ‘given’ of our personal and community lives, is the core of our experience of Transfiguration; the discovery that what we call matter, reality, fact, body, self… are not just fixed identities, but are expressions of the enormous flux of becoming, in which everything is figured, disfigured and refigured, a flow in which we are immersed, empowered to forge and to develop our self, to become available to the unfolding of the invisible in our own bodies.

Let us first be surprised by the innumerable changes that have allowed us to become something else that we were not at the beginning. Let us be first amazed at what the cosmos has become, from the Big Bang to now… What the globalized world has become, from separateness to connectedness… We contemplate the beauty, the promise of becoming, but also the challenges, the pangs, the wounds, the dark nights that have generated what we are at present, our relationships, our faith...

I desire to evoke some events that may be considered favorable spaces for a Transfiguration, in the mountains or in the deserts of our daily life, like an enlarging spiral of the divine, that incarnates itself in the eternal restlessness of becoming…

The first hint of Transfiguration I desire to evoke is the charm of creativity. I acknowledge that I am the word that God has assigned to me to embody in the world: “You are my son and daughter, the beloved”. I can love and accept myself. I can develop the gifts that I have received, embrace the lights and shades, the known and the unknown that surround my self. I can give shape to the future and to welcome it. I am invited to become father and mother of new life. I can open to the spiritual dynamism that inspires and illuminates me. I discover myself sustained by a spirit that protects me, and spurs me forward, relating and celebrating with Others the joy and the pain of life, … that is the meaning that we are here, gathered together in this Eucharist, to open ourselves to the Source of every transformation, urging us to strengthen our communion and trust.

I recognize a second, transfiguring event in the compassionate glance, when my self-centered or indifferent look towards the other turns into something different. When I begin to notice the presence, the weight, the gift, the pain of the other, what shines or moans in the eyes of the person that I meet, letting fall the frozen walls of division to foreshadow something more, deeper, yearning for meaning or for joy. Harvey Milk can be an example for this change of glance: he starts a dynamism of transfiguration when he corresponds to the need to come out into the open, to attract the attention of his Country to an excluded minority that has the right to exist, to gain visibility. He inaugurates a poetics of diversity appealing to the collective imagination of change. To open the revolutionary road of a new vision, yet, he slowly becomes aware he has to risk everything, to expose himself as a target of an explosive hatred, and finally be transformed in an icon of gay rights.

In the same way that Jesus tried to free from impediments the bodies of the persons that he met, to let the divine light blossom freely through them. 

Finally, I perceive a third movement of Transfiguration in the ecological awareness. There is not only ‘I’ and ‘we’, but we are interconnected and involved in a web of life that we are discovering more and more in all its expressions as cosmos and biosphere, as waters and plants and animals... At the same moment we are trying to unite minds around the world in a global, telematic space, forged by the convergence of computers and telecommunications. Are we invigorating divisive oppositions or are we consenting to the divine energy to release connections among natural, social, cultural, technological currents that make life on this planet possible?

This critical juncture requires risking a faith that embraces uncertainty and insecurity as conditions of creative emergence… 

These three challenges invite us to connect ourselves to the open Source of Love that presses at the borders of our singularity to open it, indefinitely, to what it has not yet be born.

I end with an hint of Etty Hillesum, from the concentration camp where she was confined, offering a new image of the connection between God and each one of us: “Maybe we may help you, God, to be unburied from the devastated experience of other people. You fully trust in us, God, to revive a particle of your goodness in the darkness we are living…”.