LAST EPIPHANY February 6, 2005

(Exodus 24:12-18, Psalm 99, Philippians 3:7-14, Matthew 17:1-9)

This is the last Sunday after Epiphany, the last Sunday before Lent. And the Gospel reading for this Sunday, every year in our 3-year cycle of readings, includes this story of the Transfiguration, the vision of Jesus on the mountain with Elijah and Moses. Along with that, August 6^th is celebrated every year as the Feast of the Transfiguration. So we may get more exposure to this story than to almost any other in the Gospels. After nearly 30 years in the ministry I’ve thought about it a lot.

I remember during my intern year working with a priest who was convinced this was a misplaced resurrection appearance story, which for him, for some reason, made it more believable.

Others have seen it as a kind of parable, with the presence of Elijah and Moses testifying to the understanding of Jesus as the culmination of the law and the prophets. The saw it as a new step in the line of Hebrew revelation, the revelation of Jesus as Son of God, wit the focus on the message rather than the medium.

As I’ve meditated on this story I guess that I’ve tended more to focus on the medium. What strikes me as more important than the timing of the experience or the Christological message of the experience, is the importance of the imagination in this or any other religious experience. The medium, in fact, may be the central message.

In the modern world we’ve lost an understanding of the real power of the imagination. We divide ourselves into mind and body. Even religious people talk about matter and spirit as if those were the only two ways of being real. We forget the middle term. We forget the soul, and the imagination, which is the organ of the soul; or we subsume both of them under the category of mind, so that both soul and imagination, we think, are all "just in our minds."

But soul, in truth, is a third way of being. God breathed his spirit into the dust and we became living beings. We became soul. You are not your body. You are not your mind. Your body is dust: atoms, molecules, quarks, whatever. Your mind is thoughts, ideas you have. You are not the spirit that gives you life: that was, is and ever shall be the spirit of God.

It’s in their coming together that you become you. You are soul. Your body doesn’t "have" a soul. Your soul has your body. Soul is your body, but more than that. Soul is your whole life, your whole experience: perceptions, relationships, emotions and thoughts. And all of it’s processed through imagination.

We’ve been able, in our time, to access, through the sophisticated processes of some of the most advanced scientific experiments, the structures and activity of the natural world. They involve subatomic particles and energy transfers, the inter-changeability of matter and energy, a quantum reality always in flux, always probabilities, never fixed and sure. But that’s not what we experience. We experience a tree or a friend. We don’t experience the electro-chemical functioning of neuro-transmitters, we experience an idea or a memory or fear or love. These all are images. We use the imagination to translate the material world into a lived world, a soul world.

And this is how we relate with God as well. Image is what we share with God. "In the image of God", it says, we were created. God came to us in Jesus as image; "He is the image of the invisible God", Colossians says. And image is perceived in the imagination.

Yet, at least in the modern western world, we’ve forgotten soul, and we think that what’s imaginary is pretty much "unreal". So we don’t know who we are, and the world we experience is considered to be a lie. No wonder we’re so messed up. No wonder we’re so lost.

The first step back needs to be a re-appreciation of soul, and an openness to the reality of the imaginal (I use the term imaginal following the Islamic scholar Henri Corbin because the world "imaginary" is pretty stuck in dualistic thinking.)

So you are not some subject relating to an objective world "outside". You’re the whole of it. You are your whole life. You are the clearing in the forest of being in which life happens. And you relate with it all in an imaginal way: relate with the earth, relate with yourself, relate with each other, and relate with God. And God relates with you in that same imaginal way.

But there’s more, I think. More than even this first opening to soul, because even when we don’t know it, we’re still living in soul. Even when we don’t understand it, we still relate with everything through the imagination. The problem with modern religious experience isn’t so much with "finding" our soul, or using our imagination, but with the direction that soul is turned, and the questions that the imagination is drawn to deal with.

To get to that I want to use the six questions I was taught in high school that every journalist should be asking: Who? What? Where? When? Why? And How?

Think of your life as involving the "who" and "what" questions. Your life is filled with "whos" and "whats". Who are you really? Who do you love? What do you want? What’s your life about? What should you be afraid of? Who can you trust?

Think of the "when" and "where" questions as the stage on which that life is played out. When and where make up your boundaries, make up the horizons of your life. Our life constitutes a particular, unique portion of space-time, as Einstein would put it. It’s the clearing for our soul.

But it’s the questions "how" and "why" that cause the most difficulty – because depending on whether we’re asking "how" or "why", the what and who take on totally different natures.

"How" is a question that binds us to the world. "Why" is a question that leads us to God.

For over 500 years our culture and its best minds have almost exclusively dedicated their collective imaginations to the question "how". How do we get across the ocean to the New World? How do we conquer famine and disease? How do we establish justice and peace, even if it means building weapons of mass destruction? How do we best use the natural resources of the planet? How do we correct all the mistakes of the past that we’ve made trying to figure out how to do all this stuff?

"How" is the question that’s asked when you want to control something. And for the past 500 years we’ve been trying to control everything.

Whenever we have asked "why", we’ve usually just said "why not" – or we’ve said "because". But notice that that answer looks for answers to the question "why" in some "cause" – "be-cause". And cause and effect may be how something happens, but not why it happens.

Why something happens has to do with its purpose.

(That’s actually just in English, I think – answering "why" with some idea of a cause. In Romance languages – French, Spanish, and Italian – the question "why" (porque, or pourquoi) is answered with the idea of a purpose (pour quoi, por que again) "for what purpose is this happening.)

And purpose implies meaning. The purpose of your life, the "why" of your life, is the meaning of your life.

To answer a "why" question with cause and effect is as misguided as trying to answer a "how" question with a purpose or a meaning (which is what gets fundamentalists so mixed up when they let theology dictate science.)

By answering the question why something is, or who someone is, with an answer explaining how they came to be, turns the "why" into a "how" and eliminates meaning.

In answer to the "how" question, who you are, whom you love, what your life is all about, is only the meaningless end product of a series of causes going back to materialist roots.

In answer to the "why" question, your life fulfills an essential purpose in the universe. It’s brought into being not by the physical laws of cause and effect, but by the sacred call of God, the source of all meaning, and the goal of all life.

Now I talk about all this as constituting a "first step" to God, to relationship with God, but I realize it takes a pretty big leap.

Still, as Saint Paul says today, we press on.

We press on because the meaning of our life deserves our attention, deserves our deepest thought.

We press on because we won’t settle for one reality for Sunday morning and another, a colder one, the rest of the week.

We press on because the world is in a time of transition and crisis, and crisis always involves both danger and opportunity. The danger today is that the future will be cut off from relationship with God, or fall under the domination of alien gods, not the God of truth, not the God of love. And the opportunity is that the truth and love we find in our faith can spread, and raise us all to a new way of being human.

We press on.

Forgetting what lies behind and stretching forward to what lies ahead, we press on.

We press on toward the goal for the prize in the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

You can make a difference.

You can change the world.