The Transfiguration is also the moment of coming down the mountain when we don’t feel ready to. It is about living what we have
experienced and living differently because of it.
I often see this dynamic at work when I make a retreat or accompany others on a retreat. A person making a retreat leaves day-to-day life to go to a retreat centre –
a kind of mountain experience where one can be alone, away from the usual demands of life and able to give their full focus to being present to God.
The journey of prayer can have many ups and downs. Often though, there
comes a time in the retreat when the person has a significant encounter with God which fills them with joy, peace or a new and liberating perspective. But then the time comes to leave the retreat centre and go home, and there can be a strong reluctance to go back to the ordinary demands of life and a wish to pitch camp and stay with this moment of grace and gift.
The grace of that deep experience must be lived out in the valleys of daily life, the fetching and carrying of children, work demands, load shedding and family or community life.
An encounter with God is never just meant for us. It always has implications for how we continue to live after the experience.
As we hold the tension between the glory we have tasted and the everyday struggles of life, we live into the mystery that this week’s journey has been inviting us into and become a vessel for God’s light to shine through.
How this week have you noticed the promise and tastes of God’s glory in your life's ordinary and sometimes messy experiences?
What do you need from
God to live into the promises of your own encounters with God?
Reflections by Annemarie Paulin-Campbell
