Filled With Light: Speaking to the Soul February 24, 2022

In her lovely book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard talks about how individuals who had been blinded by cataracts, some from birth, reacted to being given the ability to see when those operations to remove cataracts were first available in the late 1970s through implantation of a new lens. For people who had been sighted most of their lives, the operations were miraculous enough. But, as you can imagine, the most shocking was the effect that was visited upon people who had no real memory of sight.

The surgeons found that those blind since birth had no understanding of space and depth perception, no way to name shapes or shadows or tell the difference between them. Instead, they were dazzled by the sheer brightness of the light that now flooded their eyes—vision was more a physically overwhelming sensation rather than a fully functional one of the five senses. Some were filled with delight everywhere they looked. She tells of a girl who sees a tree in a garden and stands before it, transfixed. She takes a hold of it, and at the touch of the leaves and bark names it as a tree, but then refers to it as “The tree with the lights in it.”

Dillard herself seeks to be visually amazed in her perception of the woods and creek near her home, where she walks daily. She seeks particularly to try to untrain her mind for just a moment to see the two-dimensional yet carnival-like swirl of colors and brightness of what is before her described by those with restored vision.

She searches for her own “tree with the lights in it,” what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described as “kingfishers catching fire,” to see beneath the recognition of objects as objects and instead to behold the spark within all creation. Sometimes, she manages the un-knowing of the objects around her until they broke down into their constituent colors and brightness, but only fleetingly, for an instant at a time.

Finally, one day it happened when she had all but given up after years of effort:

“Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was holy fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, not breathless by a powerful glance.” (Dillard, p. 35)

Dillard, in other words, was looking for the spark of the divine that is embedded in and that makes holy everything in creation. She goes from seeing a tree to seeing the essence of the life throbbing within the tree, and it creates a sensual and visual experience of the holy.

This coming Sunday, we will hear the story of Jesus’s Transfiguration in Luke’s gospel, and if you let your imagination really loose, to try to see as the disciples with Jesus saw, you can easily imagine a scene in which light and color similarly writhes and swirl as the true essence of Jesus is revealed to his companions. Perhaps it is that they too experience a seeing with their hearts that reveals the true nature of what usually The veil of our knowing perception is pulled back to reveal that which has not been seen before, and those who witness it are both charged and changed forever. What are we to learn from these stories of the revealing of God’s presence in the world, what is known as a “theophany,” or showing of God?

As we prepare to enter into Lent, too often people focus on the idea of deprivation and “giving up” treasured things that give us pleasure as a means of self-mortification. And after these last two years of pandemic, who can really look forward to more of that kind of experience? But what if we use the story of the Transfiguration on the Sunday before the start of Lent as a guide into a deeper, richer experience of the possibilities that Lent holds for our own transformation? What if, instead, we are encouraged to lean into the creative power of darkness in order to expand our perception?

We end the season after Epiphany each year with stories of transfiguration to give us the courage to allow our eyes to adjust to the seeing of who Jesus REALLY is in our lives, much like those disciples who witness his transfiguration. Too often we seem to expect a bearded man, wearing a loose linen tunic, sandals, gorgeously-tressed hair. We fail to perceive him in other guises: the frazzled mom working three jobs to help put food on the table; the teenager hungry for someone to take her under their wing and counter the story she hears at home about being ugly inside and out; the neighbor with whom we have been feuding for so long we no longer remember why; the panhandler on the corner we sneer at for having a cell phone. All of them are not just mundane, but holy. All of them are not just made of the common stuff of matter, but interiorly pulsing with the truth that they are children of God, right along with us ourselves. We only have to be open to perceiving it. We are all filled with light, the imprint of the holiness God breathed into our dust from the beginning.

The point of the stories of the Transfiguration is not to focus on how Jesus has been changed. Rather, what if we looked upon him and realize that the veil has been pulled back: Jesus reveals just a tiny bit of who he really is, and once we perceive that, it is we who have been changed. In a time when even the everyday and commonplace has too often become a struggle, we may not perceive the ways in which the Christ-light has been revealed to us, much less within us.

The season of Epiphany is about drawing back the veil and joyfully encouraging us to see God’s presence everywhere and for everyone. Jesus’s transfiguration calls us to embrace our own, so that we ourselves may perceive that that same glory and light resides within each of us. As Jesus transfigures us, he urges us to leave behind the gods of this world. “Come, follow me. Be the light you need to see within the world.”

Citation: Dillard, Annie, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, New York: Harper Perennial, 1998.

This was first published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on February 24, 2022.

Image: Transfiguration, by Armando Alemdar Are.