Skip to main content

A transfigured window


When I was at university, there was a 'university mission' to which I went. On three consecutive nights, there were three presentations of the Christian faith from four distinguished Christian bishops. It was an extraordinary line up - Michael Ramsey who had been Archbishop of Canterbury and a distinguished theologian, followed by the famous double act of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool, Derek Warlock, and his Anglican opposite number as Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, and finally, on the last night, Metropolitan Anthony, the charismatic and holy, Russian Orthodox prelate!

Ramsey struck me then as a man both holy and wise with a way of making complex truths simple. They all radiated a sense of holiness that detracted not one wit from their own humanity, and indeed eccentricity.

It was a surfeit of riches and today in Durham Cathedral a friend had directed me to a new (2010) stained glass window dedicated to the Transfiguration and offered in memory of Michael Ramsey for it was in Durham where he had taught, been bishop and to where he retired.

It is a beautiful window that no photograph can begin to do justice, especially as a whole. A central light, of the transfigured Christ, permeates creation. It offers a witness to the world's true nature as cosmos and to our actual participation in the divine. It points towards a hoped for, ever deepening, realisation of that grace such that every corner of the world might be illuminated, remembering its status as continual divine gift, and recover its wholeness.




It was a central theme of Ramsey's theology, as it was of Metropolitan Anthony's Orthodox faith, that we are participators in the divine nature. 'All' we need to do is to surrender into that light, an ever present offering if we have eyes to see.

As I sat there, I pondered the disciples reaction of amazement, bewilderment and an offered construction project namely to make booths for the three figures, Christ, Elijah and Moses!

This latter action struck me as a wholly perfect analogy for my own reaction to the proffered freedom of God: yes, please, but only if I can safely hedge it in with my own boundaries and worship its possibilities from afar, thank you very much! In that case, and only in that case, I can accept!

What might practicing the acceptance of transfiguration mean?

I suppose it starts with genuinely recognising it as gratuitous gift. This is how the world is, not created in 4004 BC or indeed in a 'big bang' but fundamentally held and given into being, always, now, at this moment. It is a gift of which I am wholly undeserving and yet it is wholly fitting. The only thing one needs to do with a gift is to accept it in gratitude. Yet how difficult it is to receive and be grateful and yet how necessary. The first spiritual act is to say 'thank you' - the difficulty appears that we are still like children to whom this does not come naturally or like adults for whom it has become merely perfunctory.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev