We got up this morning earlier than usual. Our daughter was to take an early morning flight to Manila. After a quick breakfast, we set out for the road. Already the world was big with the expectation of dawn.
Midway through the trip, even though to all intents and purposes we were still in darkness, the sky and its mirror image, the sea, began to fill up with a pale blue light. Like a palindrome, both offered the same clouds, the unruffled water reflecting the same wisps of white.
Joyfully I reported the scene to the wife, who was driving and serious about it, what with the headlights still on and the road only half-visible without them, and she obliged. She took a sidelong glance towards the sea, and without delay but with a smile fell back to driving.
Myself, I found that moment’s luminosity a window that opened to the very heart of things and took a shot of it with my phone camera, and also, and more especially, with the camera of thought.
We arrived at the airport in good time. Daylight was total now. The taxis were busy dislodging their passengers, bags and all, into the vestibule of the departure area, to which our daughter advanced, walking too fast for our admonitions to catch up with her.
On our way to work, the sea was back to its gray sameness, as was everything else. Whatever happened to that luster not an hour before, to that brief, shining moment.
I thought of the transfiguration of Christ. Mark writes that Jesus took Peter, James and John with him and led them up a high mountain, where they were all alone, and there he was transfigured before them.
This is how Mark describes Jesus’ appearance: his clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them.
I would call this the apostles’ morning experience of Jesus. Their noon experience would be of him as he ordinarily was. The morning experience had to do with Jesus’ glory. Jesus gave the apostles a glimpse of his splendour, the brilliance of God’s presence. As well he did because soon after that they would see Jesus disfigured, humiliated, dead—this would be their afternoon experience.
As a rule, it is our love for a person that transfigures, that makes that person shine. Richard Wilbur puts it well in his poem, “June Light.” The first stanza reads:
Your voice, with clear location of June days,
Called me outside the window. You were there,
Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare
Of uncontested summer all things raise
Plainly their seeming into seamless air.
To the poet, the loved one’s voice evokes summer, and draws him outside the window, from which he finds the loved one “light yet composed,” a phrase that for me calls up the beauty of the early morning sea, such as what we saw on our way to the airport, the splendour of a transformed world.
Might it not be that in the case of Jesus, what transfigured and made him dazzling white was his love? It was as if the other person in Wilbur’s poem shone, not because of the poet’s fondness for her, but because her affection was so intense that it had to radiate. And the poet, looking out the window, could only gasp in amazement. As did the apostles, who were at their wits’ end at the sight of the dazzling Jesus.
That same love that transfigured Jesus on the mountain would on another hill spill out of his dying body as blood. Which for me—using for the purpose the words of Wilbur in his poem about human affection—is “the first great gift of all.”