The Transfiguration

A meditation

You climbed up with them. It was a long way, and Peter complained about it the whole time, and now you are on the top and the ground is all loose stones and there is nowhere to sit.

Then look at him. He is standing a little above you in a robe so white it does not seem to be cloth, with his arms open — and there is Moses beside him with the tablets of the Law, and Elijah in his rough cloak on the other side, and they are talking to him as though they had known him always. Which they had.

Look at the three on the ground. Peter with both hands up, half in terror, half already planning the three tents. James with his face turned up and his mouth open. John with a book fallen open on his knee, which he has forgotten. They have seen something they cannot hold, and every one of them is trying to hold it.

But look once more at his face. It is not triumphant. It is almost sad — the face of someone who knows the way down from this mountain leads to another one, with a cross on it, and who has come up here so that these three will remember, when it is dark, that they once saw the light.

You want holiness. That is why you are on the mountain. Look at it here for as long as you can — the white, the open arms, the Law and the Prophets standing by — and then take it down with you, into the ordinary, where it is needed.