The light of Your face

Something I read in at Pandeli’s blog, which didn’t grab my attention when I first read it, keeps coming back to me. He was expanding upon the thoughts of Home that I had written recently, and he added several more points. The point about nostalgia, longing for home, was the one that caught my first attention, probably because I have read this in the writings of C. S. Lewis and was familiar with it. We are born longing for our true home, and that is not this world, but the world to come.

What is persistently tugging at my soul right now is what Pandeli wrote about the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ on Mount Tabor…

Home is the place where we feel most safe, where no-one and nothing can hurt us. The three disciples who witnessed the Transfiguration felt like they were home and thus Peter said to Christ, ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here...’. We are not always close to home, but it will always have a special place in our hearts. Christ asks us to let Him into our home and into our hearts, so that we may enter His home.

“The three disciples who witnessed the Transfiguration felt like they were home and thus Peter said to Christ, ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here...’.”

People speak of ‘mountain top experiences,’ and I think what they are really referring to is what happened on Mount Tabor, but now in this biblically illiterate culture what usually comes to mind is a photograph of someone standing on a mountain top and saying ‘Aaaah…’ while looking at the world laid out below. Though nature can be beautiful, super-nature is awesome, the only awesome.

But the experiences we have with God—even secular people are starting to call any ‘over the top’ experience or thought a ‘theophany’—are events that we wish could continue, that we want to be permanent, as Peter did when he said, ‘Let us make three tents, one for You, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ We notice that not Jesus, but the Father responded, ‘This is My Son, the Beloved. Listen to Him.’ (Mark 9:5-8 passim) And the tents were not made—how could they have been?

This is yet another aspect of the idea of Home, one that I experience sometimes even every day, in fact anytime I can spend some time with a precious friend: I want it to last. But on and on time must go, and we have things to do, and so we part and go back to our lives in this world. And this is part of God’s plan, His divine οικονομία, ikonomía, for us: To never let us become so at home in this world that we forget the world to come, where we will be with Him, seeing Him and speaking with Him face to face, because we will have proved victorious.

Lord, have mercy on us and let us see the light of Your face, here in this present world when we are together, and in the day without night of the world to come.