Mtr Paula Barker Datsko

Dear friends,

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, commemorating the experience reported by Peter, James, and John, who accompanied Jesus to a mountain top to pray. As they were fighting off sleep, suddenly they beheld Jesus transfigured in the light of God’s glory, conversing in that dazzling scene with Moses and Elijah. This is a pivotal moment in the gospel story as embraced by the Eastern Orthodox churches. Images of Jesus on the cross are far less pervasive in the churches of Eastern Christendom, compared to the Western devotional traditions that are familiar to us. For Eastern Christians, images of the Transfiguration are central because in this event the veil of human finitude was pulled aside, enabling mortals to behold Jesus’ divine glory. The Transfiguration reveals the truth of the one who would be crucified, deepening the pathos of Good Friday even as it foreshadows the in-breaking of Easter light. 

Light is a theme in each of the lessons appointed for today—in the Eucharistic lessons as well as those for the daily office. So let me share with you what our Eastern Orthodox siblings teach about experiences of divine light. In the early centuries of the second millennium, a devotional tradition known as hesychasm developed among a group of Orthodox monks. They practiced a type of contemplative prayer aimed at engaging the mind and the body with the soul through repetition of the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”). The body can be yoked to the prayer, for example, by pacing one’s breathing to flow in or out with the phrases of the prayer. The mind can be engaged, for example, by focusing one’s attention on repeating the prayer as a mantra and letting the mind rest in the heart. The practice brought profound inner peace to the hesychast monks. Some claimed further that the practice brought them into experiences of seeing the divine light. As you might imagine, such claims roused criticism among others. They denounced the hesychasts as heretics for imagining that they were seeing God, who cannot be seen by mortal eyes. Ultimately, the hesychasts were vindicated in the fourteenth century by Gregory Palamas, whose theological clarifications were adopted by Orthodox bishops in a series of councils in Constantinople.

Palamas explained that the experience of beholding divine light did not involve seeing the essence of God, but only God’s energies that pour like grace from God into the world. The uncreated light of God is what mortal eyes beheld at Jesus’ transfiguration, and faithful people may be blessed to see that divine light even today. 

We are people of the incarnation. We affirm that God can be fully present in created nature, as in Jesus during his earthly life. We know that ordinary bread and wine, when infused with grace and received in faith, are capable of bearing the divinized flesh of Christ into our own bodies. Similarly, consider that all creation is permeated with the outpouring of God’s uncreated energies, like light into darkness, like transforming grace. Whether or not the veil of our mortal limitations is pulled aside for us to see it in our lifetimes, the light of God’s glory is really present. It holds us in existence with unconditional love, even as it empowers us with grace through which we may become fully who we are in God’s sight. May the veil that hides your reality and mine be pulled aside, as Jesus’ was. May the light of God’s glory shine into the world through us, who are indeed among God’s beloved.

Yours in Christ,
Mtr Paula Barker Datsko