Matthew 17:1-9
Saint Augustine, Gregory of Nyassa, and a few others in that distant age made a major effort to use Greek philosophy to understand religious ideas. Their intentions were good; after all, they were in the midst of the conversion of the Roman world, and these were people that knew nothing about how Jesus and his disciples saw the world. But the idea, derived from Plato, was that the soul and the body were sort of independent, and the soul was what really mattered. That idea has become ingrained in our thinking, even to this day. But there is another current in religion which we also see in people who are mystics. They are the ones who have visions, who see something in nature that others don’t, who seem to get outside their own bodies in ecstasy. Saint Francis was one; Saint Faustina of the Divine Mercy was another. And mystics abound in Eastern Christianity. And you’ve probably had a mystical experience or two.
One of the problems with mystical experiences is that we try to explain them away. Oh, we probably don’t try to do this with the great saints, but we certainly do when someone we know who might be a little strange has one. We might call it schizophrenia; maybe it’s related to something weird going on in the brain. And most of us don’t actually seek such experiences, like some of the saints did. But we have them now and then, those moments where for a few seconds we forget about ourselves and seem to be part of something greater. I’ve had a few out in nature. Not all such experiences are positive. Saint John Vianney and Saint Padre Pio had experiences of demonic forces. But again, we explain them all away, we say, “Maybe they happen to saints but what does that have to do with me?”
Today we hear about the transfiguration, when three ordinary fishermen had a mystical experience on a mountain top. And I think most of us would agree that this wasn’t a figment of their imagination. For a moment they got a glimpse of a world more real than the one we live in day to day. And it was a world where they saw Jesus as he really is -- triumphant, immortal -- God the Son. And they saw Elijah and Moses, who in our world had been dead a long time, but in the really real world, lived on, conversing with the Son of God. And they heard the voice of God the Father, harking back to a time when he spoke with Adam and Eve as friends do, because in the really real world, God is not hidden, God cannot be missed.
And then that glimpse of the really real, the world which is more real than our own, fades away and three ordinary fishermen are back in our world.
And souls are not attached to bodies temporarily, and are destined to live on while the body is of no account, the body returns to dust. We are spiritual beings who live in this world, but get glimpses of the real world, the world where Christ lives on with the Father, with Mary his mother, with all the saints. It’s the world where there will be no barriers between people, where, as the book of Revelation tells us, God will be the light.
Saint John Paul II in his Theology of the Body talks about what original sin accomplished. It introduced sin into the world, sin which causes three perversions in the spiritual beings that we are. One is that we have a desire for pleasure, physical and mental; a second is that we have a desire to possess things. And the third is that we see ourselves as the center of our world. And out of these perversions of our nature, come sins. And also, they blind us to the real world, the world that the apostles got a glimpse of, the world that mystics enter into now and then, the world that all of us catch glimpses of as God draws us to himself.
If you are doing something you love to do, such that when you are doing it you forget yourself, you are almost unaware of the passage of time, that’s a moment when you touch the world which is real. I’ve had such moments when I’ve made a particularly difficult diagnosis; I know lawyers who have such an experience winning a complicated case. Someone golfing, who makes a hole in one. Saint Francis who sees the natural world as his own brothers and sisters. Don’t reject such experiences, don’t try to explain them away; enter into them so that you can have a glimpse of the world to which we are called, the world Jesus referred to as the Kingdom of Heaven. And ask God to give you a tiny glimpse of that world when you are looking at the host in Holy Mass when it becomes the Body and Blood of Jesus.
