Left behind
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
Feb 23, 2020—Last Epiphany
A morning hike up the mountain with your beloved teacher … and there, at the top, you see him wrapped in the radiant glory of God. You meet two of the greatest teachers and prophets of your faith and hear God promising a second great Exodus. You are given, in fact, a foretaste of the resurrection, a moment of transcendence and divine presence to carry you through the trials and the pain of the coming weeks. How glorious, how life-changing, how exhilarating!
But … what if you didn’t get to go?
You woke up in the morning, stiff from sleeping on the ground and wondering who’d forgotten to stoke the fire during the night (again). Stretching and thinking about breakfast, wondering what you all might be doing today, you realize Jesus isn’t there. He’s gotten up early, as he sometimes does, and gone away from camp. And … you try to resist counting heads, but you can tell who it is without even really wanting to know: Peter and James and John. Of course it would be.
The pang of jealousy pains you and shames you at the same time. You swallow hard. After all, you get to travel around with Jesus, healing lepers and feeding huge multitudes, right? That’s pretty cool, and it’s the most important part, really … but still.
You would have liked to go up that mountain.
After all, you too will walk the hard road to Jerusalem. You will face jeering crowds and arresting soldiers; you will know Jesus condemned and dying, dead and gone. You will feel alone and hopeless and unsure. You too could use a memory of blinding light and overpowering glory to give you hope, to get you through.
I hear it a lot. In fact, it makes me reluctant to speak about my own bolt from the blue. Because there are so many people I meet who yearn for that mountaintop experience, who are waiting for that blinding flash of light, that overpowering sense of God’s presence. And when they hear about someone else’s, it opens up this huge ache of loss, or undeserving, or … something.
There is something wordless about the longing, something like grief, but it always seems to carry a sense of something missing in their faith life, in their relationship with God. Perhaps for some it’s about validation—of them, of their worthiness, of their belovedness. Sometimes it feels as though God is the one they’d like to be validated: a nice dramatic proof of existence, an assurance that they have not believed in vain. Somehow, though, in some way they feel cut off, and they long for a mountaintop, a road to Damascus, a road to Emmaus, a burning bush, Jacob’s ladder … Heck, even a cock crowing would be something!
But more than just validation, I think we all long for passion, yearn for excitement beyond the satisfaction of the work. I mean, here’s the thing … the standard sermon for the Transfiguration is accurate: you DO have to come back down the mountain and get to the work of feeding and healing people. But it’s a lot easier to be pious about how important that day-to-day stuff is if YOU got to be up there on the mountain!! Because we want to do the work, but we also want to be inspired to do the work. We want to be set on fire.
A friend of mine once asked me, after I’d shared my conversion story, why it is that some people have these kinds of experiences and some don’t. And honestly, I didn’t have an answer for her. I still don’t. Even at my most arrogant, I wouldn’t make any claims to divine favor. But even suggesting it’s a matter of being open to them suggests that there is something that you can do to bring one about, and ways to push them away. And true enough: we can use the noise and hubbub and busyness of our lives to drown God out. Spending more time in silence, with just ourselves and God, WILL create more space for God to break in.
But it’s no guarantee of a flash of light. Take, for instance, the story of Teresa of Avila. After some striking spiritual experiences in her youth, she then spent decades living in a convent keeping up all the motions of a spiritual life. And yet, she described it as barren: unleavened by that rushing sense of God’s presence. Decades, until it opened up once again and she was led to write her mystic masterwork: The Interior Castle. Decades. During which she prayed the hours, performed her work around the convent, read her bible and spent long periods in silence. All the while feeling nothing.
Which reminds us of a couple of truths regarding “mountaintop experiences”: First, that they are mysterious and unbiddable. Even one such as Teresa of Avila could not summon one through force of will or desire. But even more than that, the pattern of her life demonstrates that even the most powerful spiritual experience does not change everything, does not create an eternal sense of closeness with God. As a child, she went into religious ecstasies. And then … nothing. For yeeeeeears.
Which is not to say that intense spiritual experiences are not to be desired. It is just to be realistic, and perhaps reassuring, about their actual scope. One great flash of light does not make or break a life spent in relationship with God.
It’s like, well … the parallel to romantic love would be obvious, even if this weren’t Valentine’s Day. That giddy passion at the beginning of a relationship, the heady, intense sensation of “falling in love” … it is fantastic, it is intoxicating … but it is not the substance of a relationship. The memory of it might sustain us; it might get us through some times when we cannot for the life of ourselves remember WHY we are with this person. But it cannot, in the end, take the place of the work: the compromises, the forgiveness, the patience, the small daily kindnesses that create the actual fabric of a life together. That weave will then allow passion and fire to continue, but it is the fabric—it is the day to day work and commitment—that gives the passion life.
And if we broaden the lens a little, we can also see that this kind of love does not make or break an entire life. This time of year can be painful for those who long for a romantic relationship, and that lack, that longing, can consume a person, can make him feel as though it will determine everything. But the thing is, though there are many wonderful things that can come from such a relationship, anyone who has ever been in one knows: it doesn’t fix everything magically. No matter how deep your longing to have one, how intense your grief at being alone … having it will not make everything better.
So it is with these mountaintop spiritual experiences. They don’t change everything. They do not make all the doubts and questions go away (just look at the things Peter continued to say and do after this day!). And perhaps most importantly: they are not, in and of themselves, a relationship with God, nor are they proof of a relationship with God.
If you are looking for proof, it is actually your longing that will stand you in good stead. As C. S. Lewis famously wrote, when you yearn for something that deeply, the yearning itself is joy. It will define you, that kind of yearning. And if what you yearn for is God, for closeness with the One who created you, the yearning itself is a mountaintop. The yearning itself is a gift from God, is God reaching out to grab your inmost heart.
Dwell within that yearning. Sit with it, in the quietness of your heart. No, really, I mean this: if you’re looking for a mountaintop, make some time to do this in your life. Enter into that yearning and discover the size of it, the shape of it, the feel of it. Know that it is the dwelling God has created for Godself within you. Know that it is God’s gift to you and it is yours. I don’t know what it looks like; I don’t know what you might learn if you spend some time there. But I know that it is an invitation to you to walk up the mountain. And I believe that if you do so, there is a good chance that you yourself will be transfigured … transformed. Perhaps in a flash of light. But more likely, bit by bit, over a lifetime. As you connect, more and more deeply, with the One who is the Source of all Being. Amen.