For When You See a Fairy

Propers: The Transfiguration of Our Lord, AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Years ago, one of my favorite theologians told a story which has haunted me ever since. It began some decades back, when said theologian was yet a teenaged undergraduate in northern England. There was at that time a middle-aged man at the university—let’s call him David—who split his time between working in the library and pursuing his Master’s degree.

David was an affable fellow, usually found engaging in long conversations with friends either across the library desk or at the local coffee bar. He had piercing blue eyes, and a subtle philosophical mind apparently incapable of malice or deceit.  In short, everybody loved him. And why not? He was clever, quirky, compassionate, deeply devout, and possessed an almost eerie ability to discern people’s states of mind and to diagnose their spiritual ills.

What really set him apart, however, was that ever since he had been a very young child—as long as he could remember, in fact—David had been able to see and to hear things which, he realized only later, most people simply could not see. For him, it was common occurrence to witness an angel standing radiant beside the door of every church, and a tiny anthropine fairy dancing atop every open flower. This was normal for David. He thought everyone could see angels and fairies.

Nor was it unusual for him to receive visions or auditions from God. He would speak of these things earnestly, innocently—yet he was not childish, at least not in any negative sense of the word. People found themselves believing him, or at least not quite being able to doubt. Around age seven or so, his parents tried to stop David from talking about such things, fearing developmental delay or perhaps insanity. But it never went away. Where you or I would see an open door, an open flower, he would see angels and fairies.

One cannot help but think of the early chapters of Genesis, when humanity lived in harmony with nature and with spirits, when it was commonplace to walk with God in the cool of the evening breeze. The Taoists of China have a similar tale, of the early days of humankind, when people communed with earth angels and with nature spirits, a time now lost.

David suspected that at an earlier point in our species’ history most people’s minds worked more like his, seeing things that we can no longer see, listening to voices which we can no longer hear. And if that sounds like far too kooky a notion for postmodern people to entertain, keep in mind that one of the most controversial hypotheses to come out of neuroscience and psychology in the twentieth century—1976’s Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind—posits something not dissimilar: that once, long ago, exalted voices spoke through one half of our mind while the other half of us listened and learned.

Wouldn’t it be something, if our minds all worked like David’s: seeing wonders all about us, the natural and supernatural intermixed; retaining all our mental faculties, not insane, not naïve, but simply compassionate, contented, and happy? To see an angel at every church, a fairy in every flower, to receive the voice and the vision of God as clearly as I’m appearing here before you—what wouldn’t we give for that? What wouldn’t any of us give, to return to Eden like that?

The years rolled by, and David came under the care of a new physician, to whom he spoke of his visions quite openly and honestly. His therapist, sadly and to no-one’s real surprise, became alarmed at David’s matter-of-fact acceptance of all this, and had him declared a threat to himself and to others. And they drugged him and drugged him and drugged him and drugged him, until at long last the fairies faded, the angels disappeared, and whatever magic door had been opened in his mind was at last closed. And the light in those blue eyes of his died.

He never did get over that now-lost part of his soul. David wasted away, dying young of pneumonia at the age of 68. And at his funeral, the therapist told the theologian that at least he was comforted by the knowledge that David had, at the last, a small window of sanity there at the end, when he finally got in touch with reality.

“How strange and barbaric,” the theologian sighed, as he recounted this sad tale. “And what a superstitious age ours really is.”

In today’s Gospel we read together the story of the Transfiguration of Our Lord. Jesus takes Peter, John, and James up a mountain, to a place set apart, and there they witness a remarkable vision. Jesus’ skin and clothes glow with a radiant light. The voice of God the Father thunders from the heavens. The divine cloud or Shekinah veiling the presence of God descends upon the mountain, and the forms of Moses and Elijah appear—the great Lawgiver and greatest Prophet of the Hebrew Bible—together speaking with Christ.

And Peter, as a good and observant Jew, recognizes this as the end of the world and the beginning of the New Age, with the Kingdom of God inaugurated upon this earth. The number of references and parallels here to the Old Testament are too numerous to recount. Suffice to say that Peter wants to build tabernacles—tents—because that’s how Moses spoke to God face-to-face in the wilderness. And at the End of the Age, when all things are at last made new, that’s how God will speak to all of Israel: each in his little tabernacle, speaking with God face-to-face.

Moses and Elijah both spoke to God on mountaintops; here they speak to Christ on the mountaintop. The Shekinah surrounded the presence of God in the Tabernacle in the wilderness and the Temple in Jerusalem; here it surrounds the person of Jesus. Everything about this crazy scene, this world turned upside-down, points to the truth that Jesus is God, God in the flesh, God come down, Immanuel, God-With-Us. But then as abruptly as it began—it’s over. No more light, no more voice, no more cloud. No more Moses or Elijah. Just Jesus. Plain old Jesus Christ.

And He comes down from the mountain and begins the long trek towards Jerusalem, to Golgotha, to the Cross; there to suffer and die and rise again with hell harrowed, the tomb shattered, and heaven itself hallowed by the Resurrection of Our Lord.

But here’s the thing about Transfiguration. It is not, you shall note, the Transformation of Our Lord. Jesus is in no way changed. He is who and what He’s always been. What’s changed here is us: how we see Him, how we know Him. Peter and James and John are given one brief glimpse of reality, of Jesus as He truly is. And it astounds them, terrifies them; they don’t know what they’re saying.

The Church Fathers taught that God never turns His face from a sinner, any more than the sun turns away from the earth. What hides the face of God is our sin, the smoke of illusion encrusting us, which cuts us off from His glory, veils us from His face. The therapeutic superstition of our age is not religion or spirituality but the blinkered insistence that this is all there is: nothing more than the next paycheck, the next meal, the next stress, the next pleasure; that there is no higher destiny for us all.

This, mind you, despite the fact that all the things we hold most dear—consciousness, justice, mercy, freedom, love, goodness, beauty, truth, transcendence, human rights and dignity—all of them point beyond this world, beyond what we can see and touch, to an infinitely deeper and higher and greater reality.

We claim that this is all there is, and then pretend that any of it really matters? It’s ridiculous. It’s self-contradictory. It is, in fact, insane—to claim that we’re all just clouds of particles who’ve mistaken each other for people, then to walk about as though we had goals or value, will or worth. There’s your superstition.

The world we know is just the beginning. And everything good in it, from reason and justice through science and art to faith and hope and love, all point beyond themselves to a reality in which God speaks, and angels appear, and fairies dance. Before we can be in any true sense transformed, the world must first be transfigured in our eyes. We must know things for what and whose they truly are.

And the way that begins is the same way it ends: by keeping our eyes forever focused on Jesus Christ our Lord. Here in Him does God meet man, heaven meet earth, life meet death. Here in Him are all our hopes at last as one fulfilled. Maybe not in the way we expect. Peter didn’t see the coming of the Cross, and didn’t want to hear it when it was foretold. But the darkest shadows of the valley of death give way to the Easter Light. And something like scales will fall from our eyes when we truly see Him as He is.

It is an enchanted world, and we are miracles walking within it. Deny it all you want, it still rings out true: God made the world in love, and that same love makes you.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

The opening story, along with some vocabulary and piquant turns of phrase, have been taken from David Bentley Hart’s article “Therapeutic Superstition.”