On Reunions and the Feast of the Transfiguration

Well, the best laid plans often "gang aglay" as Robert Burns once said. I had thought I would have a post up from the Feast of the Transfiguration but the reunion weekend was just too full and wonderful and I was simply wiped out. So, here we are more than a week later and I am still thinking about the Transfiguration and how it related to the weekend. I said I wanted to write a little about transfiguration in light of it all and I would like to do that --- at least as a start.

Unlike some reunions this one was not merely a single evening spent having dinner with a group of people one no longer knows or cares about. It was not about having outgrown people and places nor was it about speaking different languages professionally or being unable to relate. It was not about bragging to set ourselves apart or lacking empathy and compassion. Perhaps that happens in earlier reunions when folks have not but begun careers and families and businesses and work on terminal degrees; I don't know.  It was, for me, and I think for at least several others of us, about, or at least a little like, what T.S. Eliot describes when he writes, "we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." In my journal I said it this way,  "It felt like we were each pilgrims, journeying apart from one another, finding our way, struggling, succeeding, loving, sometimes alone and lonely and sometimes not, at home yet still journeying --- still not quite "home" in the way we came "home" this weekend."

"I am so blessed." That is what I feel now and it is the sincere refrain I heard numerous times at our reunion dinner as each of  about 23 of us stood with mic in hand and told our stories to our classmates and friends. So many ended their narratives by affirming for the rest of us: "I am so blessed!" I was able to stay with a friend and her husband along with another friend who flew down from Sacramento. Over the next days we were joined by two other once-close friends and spent hours together talking, eating, driving around our old haunts, attending the reunion dinner, praying and sharing about our faith (each of the five of us has her own unique faith and faith tradition. I don't know when I have sat at a table with such a diverse group of Christians: Christian Science, Lutheran, Baptist, Evangelical Christian (worshipping with Messianic Jews), and Roman Catholic. But in spite of the few difficulties (or "minor speed bumps") created by this diversity we talked for some hours regarding our faith and spirituality; what I saw with my own "new eyes", what I recognized by the resonances of my heart, was that in some incredibly fundamental way each of us have the same hearts --- hearts shaped by that faith and by the truth of God and the Gospel); but our hearts were also shaped by coming to know each other in the present. It is this entire dynamic of really coming to know each other in the present and being blessed by every surprising bit of revelation that reminds me most of the Transfiguration.

I was not surprised that each of us has grown older and changed physically in many ways. Neither should I be surprised, I guess, that each of us has grown into the extraordinary people we had the potential to become --- though our journeys were often nothing like we once anticipated they would be. But I was gratified by and a bit stunned at that. What really awed me was how little we had each changed and how truly ourselves we had become over the years. That too reminded me of the Transfiguration. I found myself knowing these people again, well on some levels, for the first time on others. First, after the initial meetings when physical differences dominated and more than anything else the years apart still defined our relationships with one another, I found myself forgetting what we each looked like 50-60 years ago; even more, I literally saw these friends transfigured by their personal stories. The images from youth which had filled my mind and remained normative for me of who these women were ceased to be normative except as images of early and essential life and potential now more fully embodied and shaped by one's history. At the same time those early images of these old friends became the dynamic form which shaped and animated their Selves now --- analogous to the way a soul is "form of the body" and "builds a body around itself". 

I also found myself realizing freshly how much I had really loved this smaller group of women with whom I spent about three days --- and how truly I loved them now. In this too I was struck by how amazingly they each embodied the abundant life and grace of God and had grown to do that as promised by Christ as the "perfection" of the potential each carried deeply within themselves all those years ago. And for the first time I knew myself in the same way. Perhaps in this way too I came to understand the Transfiguration a bit better. After all, this is the story of Jesus being revealed for who he really is to those who, for all their defects and bits of personal ignorance and insensitivity, know him better than most. But they must also come to see him with new eyes. They must come to know him not as they did when they were younger and took him for granted even as they loved him. They must come to see him as the exhaustive embodiment of God's story with and for his people. They must come to see him as someone stamped first with the shadow of the cross and then with the light of the resurrection and the fire of the Spirit. And that is how I came to see each of these women --- and perhaps it is a piece of how they came to see me.

The experience of  the Transfiguration --- the invitation to journey in the desert and eventually stand on the mountain with Jesus, to truly know him, to be known and loved by him, comes to us in ways and at times which will surprise and console, challenge and heal. This is what I experienced when I went home weekend before last. I knew these friends I had not seen in 50 years. I knew them and they opened themselves to knowing me; it is an astounding gift of God to come to know them for the faithful women they have become, to come home and have it be home in the truly profound ways we need as adults and pray for every day of our lives. In and with Christ [[We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.]] Thanks be to God!