On Transfiguration and Authentic Humanity

I am thinking about transfiguration and what the story of Jesus' transfiguration tells us. The story I have posted many times here regarding Jesus' transfiguration involves the main point that we don't see what is right in front of us; we see what we expect or are conditioned to see. Especially we don't always see the dignity of every human person or the profound potential which resides at their core. We sometimes speak of the human person as imago dei and we may recognize the vocation each one has to become imago Christi, but my sense is that most times folks don't quite know what to do with these references. How seriously are we meant to take them? Are they just a form of poetry or do they say something about the literal truth about our nature?

During Lent our focus tends to be more on the penitential, on our own sinfulness or "falling short" of the great potential and call that does exist at the core of our being than it is on that potential itself. We locate God outside of ourselves as judge, but can neglect the truth which the human heart reveals, namely that the human heart is the privileged place where God bears witness to Godself, and that the source and center of human life is divinity itself. During Lent then, while we attend to a need to do penance, to pray more regularly, and to develop the generosity of those who are loved unconditionally by God, we must not neglect the underlying conviction of the season, namely, we do these things because the person we are most truly shines like the sun and mediates the life and light of God to our world. Lenten penance is not merely about tidying up our moral lives or cleaning up the minor deficiencies or failings which mark and mar those lives; it is about getting in better touch with the incredible potential we carry within us and are called to embody exhaustively for God's sake and the sake of his entire creation.

To be a human being is to be the image of God. To be authentically human is to become imago Christi --- not as some pale reminder of a distant historical figure we admire a bit (or even love a lot), but as those who allow him to become the very shape and quality of the way we think and feel, approach and act towards our God, ourselves, and others. When the original disciples looked at Jesus they saw the Kingdom of God alive in our world; in him they saw human freedom as the counterpart of divine sovereignty and divine power made perfect (fully realized) in weakness. When we look at one another we should see the very same things. In Christ we see God, in ourselves we should see Christ. Transfiguration is at the heart of Lent, not only because conversion from sin is necessary, but because our deepest, truest selves yearn to shine through and remake us from our hearts outward. Transfiguration reveals what is truest, deepest, and lives right in front of us in every person and in ourselves all the time; it is a synonym for the conversion and reconciliation (the healing) of ourselves so that the divinity we know as "Love-in-Act," shines through and illuminates the whole. That is the essence of authentic humanity.