“O God, who before the passion of your only begotten Son, revealed his glory on the holy mountain. Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and changed into his likeness from glory to glory.”

The course of our lives, it has been said, is traced by our transitions. For it is these turning points, that break and remake us, and change us in ways that will never allow us to be quite the same again. In a lifetime, each of us has tens, perhaps hundreds of imperceptible and dramatic transitions, an each of these transitions affect us deeply, leaving indelible impressions on our character and personality. The transitions we remember, those that are brought to mind even as I am speaking to you, and you are listening, those which fill us with joy and those which fill us with sorrow, are moments when our lives are forever rerouted, spiritually transfigured, and elevated out of time itself.

The life of Jesus, as the Gospels recall, was punctuated by transitions. Each day was marked by permutation; no step was retraced; no opportunity was squandered; no moment was lost. So constantly was Jesus facing transition, that he compared himself to birds with nests, and foxes with holes, for he himself had no place to lay his head.

And of the many transition he faced, none is greater than that of his transfiguration. The story is an old, familiar one, and yet somehow, it continues to talk hold of our imagination. Here upon a mountain, the mystery of the Incarnation is revealed to three simple, illiterate fishermen. It is as if heaven and earth are joined, and Jesus is visited by Moses and Elijah, two figures of antiquity who in their own times had been drawn to mountains to behold the divine presence of the Almighty. For Moses, it had been Mt. Sinai, upon which he received the sacred tablets of the Law. For Elijah, it had been Mt. Horeb, where the Most High appeared not in the awe-inspiring elements of nature, but in a still, small voice. On mountains, Moses and Elijah had beheld the glory of God, and on a mountain once again, they sat with Jesus. Overwhelmed, the disciples also recount hearing a voice: “This is my beloved Son, listen to him.”. And then, as suddenly as they appear, Elijah and Moses are gone.

Naturally, the questions that arise out of this account are endless, and they have puzzled scholars and lay people alike for centuries. Did the story happen as it is told? What does one make of the appearances of Elijah and Moses? Was this a hallucination of men whose consciousness was altered? Theories abound, yet it is really impossible to answer with certainly any of these questions. There is one question we might very well ask, however, and try our best to answer. Why did Jesus and his disciples leave the mountain? Could not the Gospel ended right here, in the glory of epiphany? This is what many have gleaned from the life of Jesus, and thus they have built their crystal cathedrals, and extol the power of positive thinking, and the supreme virtues of success and power. Would it not be better to build booths in this lofty place,and create a place of permanence and bliss? Perhaps Peter had it right. Master, it is good we are here, it is well we have arrived.

But lest we lose sight of the next chapters of our Gospel, and the full meaning of the life of Jesus and our own, we see his transfiguration as a transition. Yes, it is true that our spirits were made for light, and like tender shoots straining for the brightness of the morning sun, we too stretch toward that which illumines our lives. Our souls were made for epiphany. Yet the fall of Adam in the words of Thomas Merton, ‘has turned us inside out, and the lights we now love is darkness.’ Thus, the only way to true light is a kind of death.

In the Fourth Century, St. Gregory of Nyssa made this observation: “The spiritual life is a journey from darkness to light and from light to darkness. It is a transition from a light which is darkness to a darkness which is light. The darkening of senses is like a cloud in which the soul becomes accustomed to travelling blind, without relying on the appearances of changing things or on the emotional import of experience and its judgements of truth and falsity, good and evil”

And so, we see Jesus and his disciples leaving the mountain. And so, we too, leave this Season of Light, the Season of Epiphany, to begin a Holy Lent. To leave the light; to reenter our own darkness, and our own frailty and mortality. The transfiguration in the Gospels marks the transition form Jesus as Prophet to Jesus as Messiah, from Jesus the human being to Jesus the Christ. Jesus, however, does not present his divinity in a triumphalistic, imperialistic way. He instead lead us by way of the cross, to the kind of death that brings us finally to the light our souls seek. This paradox of faith, that only in our darkness can light be found, is not easy to understand, even for those who have devoted themselves heart and soul to being one with God. Yet the way of the cross, the journey we take from Ashes to Easter is one that leads into darkness and renunciation. In this the mystics serve as guides. One of the great mystics, St. John of the Cross, left us these words of advice:

“In order to have pleasure in everything, desire to have pleasure in nothing. In order to arrive at possessing everything, desire to possess nothing. In order to arrive at being everything, desire to be nothing. In order to arrive at knowing everything, desire to know nothing. In order to arrive at that wherein there is no pleasure, thou must go by a way in which thou hast no pleasure. In order to arrive at that which thou knowest not, thou must go by a way thou knowest not. In order to arrive at that which thou possesses not, thou must go by a way thou possessesth not. In order to arrive at that which thou are not, thou must go through that which thou are not.

Change does not come by wishing things were different. It comes by the way of deep personal struggle and investment and sacrifice. Our lives, our relationships, and things in our world do not change simply by reveling in the light. They change as we are willing to move into the darkness, our darkness, the world’s darkness.

Perhaps it takes a saint to pursue such a course in life. Perhaps the rest of us find the mountain an irresisitible haven of security and permanence, and so we cannot leave it. There are those, however, who see the mountain as it truly is, a place of change and transition. A place to be lifted up so that no dark corner of life need not be feared. It was a night in Lent thirty five years ago that such a one spent his last evening on the mountain, and addressing a group of Memphis garbage collectors, he said these well-known words: “It really doesn’t matter what happens now.” Like Jesus, Dr. King knew his time had come. That very day he had received threats on his life. “Well,” he continued, “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now. Because I have been to the mountaintop. Like anyone else, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed m to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over and seen the Promised Land. And I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So, I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. I had a dream this afternoon that the brotherhood of man will become a reality. With this faith, I will go out and carve a tunnel of hope from a mountain of despair.”

Dr. King’s mountaintop experience, like all of our transitions, was an occasion for grief, and the world has wept bitterly ever since for the loss of this great man. Yet his time on the mountain was also the occasion for celebration, for Dr. King had stepped into the dark heart of the world’s bigotry and hatred, and even there had encountered the light, the light that is transforming the darkness, the light that was calling him, and all of us, home.

Transition is the occasion for grief and celebration, sorrow and joy, grace and pain, for each and for all of us in life. It is the occasion for change. Twenty-one years ago, on a cold night in the Season of Epiphany, I entered a period of transition that has affected in so many ways everything I have done ever since. It was my ordination to the priesthood. And on that night, I had given my father the responsibility of delivering the charge. He chose, among other things to say these words, first spoken to Moses on Mt. Sinai by the Lord our God: “You have stayed long enough on the mountain, turn now and take your journey. I set the land before you, go in and possess it.”

It is these same words that cause Jesus, and Peter and James and John to come off the Mount of the Transfiguration. And surely, these same words are meant for all of us who are in transition, for all of us about to begin the journey from ashes to Easter. For they give to us confidence and hope, to take leave of the mountain, to turn toward what is ahead, set out on the journey, toward that place of darkness that leads to light, toward that place of death that leads to life.