Towards Sunday, February 7, 2016

Reading:  Luke 9:28-43 (Jesus goes up a mountain as Moses and Elijah did in ancient times when they encountered and experienced the Divine face-to-face, or at least face-to-back, and had their lives, thoughts, and even the illumination of their faces changed by the encounter.  Three of Jesus' disciples go up the mountain with him, and they witness his transfiguration.  Then, after wishing they could mark the spot and stay there, they go back down to face the realities of life in the valley below.)

How do we understand the interplay of mountaintop and valley?  Is God found on the mountaintop?  Or is the mountaintop simply a place where we are most opened to God, and thereby enabled to walk more fully in God's way in the valley? 

Where does God actually prefer to live and be known?  On the mountaintop, or in the valley?  What is the direction or the narrative arc of God's life? 

Is Jesus transfigured as a unique individual in the history of humankind and among all religious experience and traditions?  Or is he transfigured by and through and as a sign of his particular integration of holy law and prophetic vision in his life?  The way Moses was transfigured by his immersion in and embrace by the Law of God on the mountain?  The way others perhaps too are transfigured?  Including, in some way, ourselves? 

Is there only one mountain, and many ways up it (as one school of inter-religious conversation imagines it)?  Or are there actually many mountains (each touching the ether in their own way), all intended ultimately to lead the climbers back down into a single valley (to live in peace according to what we have discovered and been opened to, on our separate mountaintops)?