Mtr Mary Trainor

There’s a certain slant of light…*

Dear friend,

Emily Dickinson is a favorite poet. I am not her only fan by far, though an adoring public would not greet her in her lifetime. While a selected few might be graced with a poem now and then, her poetry was not formally published until four years after her death.

There’s a certain slant of light, winter afternoons….

Today’s Gospel reading from Matthew 17(1-13) brings this poem to mind. You’ll recognize the scripture quickly: “Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain by themselves. [Jesus ] was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white.”

Brightness and light and dazzling whiteness accompany the transfiguration, as do encounters with Moses and Elijah, and the voice of God the Father telling them to listen to Jesus.

We are not told how long all of this takes, this revelation of God on a mountaintop. My guess is that the encounter was fairly brief, yet so momentous we talk about it to this very day. Whatever other import we can derive from the transfiguration, for me it is at root a breaching of the membrane between this world and the full Kingdom of God. It is one of those experiences, as the ancient Celts called them, of a “thin place.”

Heavenly hurt, it gives us--we find no scar,
But internal difference, where the meanings are.

It’s my belief that God comes to us, all of us, in similar encounters across a lifetime. Our own thin places, hard to describe to another, yet rich with “internal difference, where the meanings are.” Perhaps nothing dramatic, but if we’re paying attention, even in retrospect, we can recognize each as a “thin place.”

In 1957, my family moved to a house on a commercial corner in El Monte, California. It was on that property that we operated a nursery-garden center for thirty-two years; and it was in that house that I finished schooling and became an adult. It was also in that house where I encountered thin places, though it would be decades before I had language to address it.

In the living room of that house, there were two high windows, through which streamed late afternoon sunlight. Particularly in the winter, there was an honest-to-God slant to the light. And its quality diffuse, as though filtered through gauze, always took my breath away. Not for hours. Not even for minutes. Just a fragmentary moment of encounter with something beautiful. I wanted to stay in that moment forever.

One day, my brother and I were each back for a brief visit. It was winter. And late afternoon. We entered the living room at the same time, and I again was struck by the special light.

Wanting to share this experience, I gently elbowed Jim and said, “See that light? Is that not the most awesome experience?”

He turned toward the same window and looked at the same light. And answered, “No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

When it comes, the landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the distance
on the look of Death –

Mtr. Mary