Illuminating the ordinary

This week we have a bonus lectionary post, which is cross-posted at Journey With Jesus. We'll put up another Transfiguration post tomorrow.

Learning to see in new ways is one of the most difficult tasks of the transformed life. Old habits of selective vision, old choices about what to leave out and what to focus on tend to dominate us, even as we search for new ways of living that are in closer communion with the life of the Spirit. Transfiguration--that mysterious transformation of vision that is narrated in today's readings--is a radical, if brief, way of illumination.

The disciples go with Jesus to the mountain--a place out of their ordinary environment--and there, they are able to grasp, for a moment, a transcendent reality that lives just beyond their normal capacities. In Annie Dillard's essay "Seeing," she recounts the experience of people who had been blind at birth, but had received sight thanks to a restorative surgery. To begin to see the world, the newly sighted had to reconcile preconceived notions of the world with objects, colors and distances. Even with this radical new gift, it was easy to get the meaning of what they were seeing wrong. This suggests a spiritual kind of sight as well as a physical--that a person having received a radical new gift might struggle, like Peter in today's Gospel, to understand precisely how to use it.