Mountaintops of Magnificent Love

Glory is an interesting concept. We think of things like gold and meteors streaking across the sky and loud music and the sound of wings of angels making a wind of love …

Glory, however, is simply the manifestation of God, who is love; glory is the magnificent manifestation of love. When I am struggling to get through the morning and I get to where my husband is waiting patiently for a hug, … that … is glory … that is magnificent … that is love manifest.

The question is not whether God will show us glory, or whether we have to climb some mountain to see it, but rather, can we see the glory of God that is always present?

Transfiguration is the theme of this last Sunday before Lent; it moves us (all too quickly) from the ministry of Jesus into the march toward crucifixion and resurrection.

In 2 Kings [2:1-12] we see Elishah preparing to accept the mantle from Elijah. Elishah is absolutely faithful to God and to the ministry of his mentor Elijah. But also, Elishah is absolutely already in charge and already in full prophecy. Thus, as they move along in their slow journey Elishah keeps shushing the “prophets” and giving his full loving attention to Elijah. When Elijah has transfigured via chariot Elishah is fully invested, I his loving devastation.

Love is never silent [Psalm 50:1-6].

Did you see the news about the Roman pushback on the blessing of gay relationships this week? The bishop of Rome is pushing back at the homophobes who “object” to his authorization of blessings for LGBTQ love. (“Pope denounces ‘hypocrisy’ of those who criticize LGBTQ blessings.”)

God will not keep silent, God calls creation to witness justice, glory is love revealed in magnificence. Light, love, knowledge, and glory … shine. In our hearts [2 Corinthians 4:3-6].

The Feast of the Transfiguration celebrates the moment in which Jesus was “transfigured before [Peter and James and John]”[Mark 9:2-9]. On a mountaintop Jesus’ clothes become “dazzling white” and Elijah and Moses are talking with him. They hear the voice of God from an overshadowing cloud. And then “suddenly” they are alone again, coming down the mountain.

It was a matter of Jesus showing Peter and James and the doors of perception of the infinite manifestation of the dimensions of God.

It is about how we must learn that we all can be transformed. Indeed, we all are transformed.

There is a wonderful trans woman in my neighborhood. It is always a joy to drop by her shop and say hi and see her so fully alive. She is in every moment clearly joyful for the manifestation of love that has transfigured her life.

I remember many decades ago observing a trans woman who clearly was making an early solo flight one day. What I remember most clearly are her courage, on the one hand, and the love that surrounded her, on the other, as her friends all poured love upon love upon love upon her to help her. Six months later she was more confident and those same friends were still there each day like bedrock. I watched this whole drama from a dozen feet away at the time. It has always stayed with me that this woman had to make that journey (like Elishah and Elijah, and like Peter and James and John and Jesus). She had to keep saying “shush” to the nonbelievers, and she had to keep courageous love in her heart, until at last, transformed into the woman God had intended her to be, she was dazzling and magnificent in her transfiguration.

No meteors, but plenty of angel wings, and mountaintops of magnificent love.

Last Sunday after Epiphany (Feast of the Transfiguration) Year B RCL 2024; 2 Kings 2:1-12; Psalm 50: 1-6; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-9)

©2024 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Give Thanks and be Transfigured

I had a miracle yesterday. I think.

You know, I’ve written here before that miracles are both more common than you think and probably happening under your radar. You have to pay attention to know when you have been visited by angels.

No point in going into the details; a bunch of things went wrong and then miraculously went right. At one point I stood up straighter than usual and just said to God “ok, I get it, but what just happened here?” And then I said to myself “just give thanks.”

And that is the message of transfiguration.

Love requires us to be focused on it, on love, and that means we cannot be focused on anything else. And that is the hardest part because we are built to be multi-tasking multi-focused individuals.

But if we want to “see” and “know” the transfiguring presence of love in our lives we have to shift our focus into the dimension of love.

Try thinking of it as a matrix or a maze in a matrix in three dimensions … you don’t walk a path so much as you navigate the points creating a pathway through.

LGBTQ people know this well. We spend our entire lives navigating a pathway through dimensions of oppression, of exclusion, of disenfranchisement, and we do it with love, for love, because God has created us in God’s own image as people of love. And at all of this we succeed because our lives are transfigured in creation by love. Give thanks for love; that is the message of transfiguration.

The presence of God is, of course, transfiguring. In the scripture [Exodus 34:29-35; Luke 9:28-36], the authors go to great lengths to tell us this. Of course, this transfiguration is not really so much visible as it is detectable. You know when you are in the presence of someone who knows the presence of God. How do you know? Good question. You just do. Right?

Sing, pray, rejoice, and give thanks constantly [Psalm 99]. Maybe this is another clue? Look for the hearts of those who sing, pray, rejoice and give thanks.

[2 Peter 1:13-21] The message of love is, you must love actively, deliberately, consciously. Start with loving yourself. Then move to loving the things around you that you love. Give thanks for what you love. And then move your love ever outward to the world around you.

Imagine the concentric circles of love overlapping and you can “see” as a lamp shining in a dark place, the power of love, which is as the dawning of a new day and the rising of a morning star in your heart.

The disciples tried to catch God on that mountaintop [Luke 9:28-36]. They wanted to build “booths” to keep God in. You know, sort of like I cage my tomato plants so they don’t grow crazy but stay where I want them and do what I want them to do (well, sort of). But, of course, it doesn’t work that way. God is in the breath, God is in the vitality, God is in the eternity. God is in creation. God, who is love, is in the love and in the loving.

Give thanks for love, and be transfigured.

The Feast of the Transfiguration 2023 (Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Peter 1:13-21; Luke 9:28-36)

©2023 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Love, glory, propagation, transfiguration

I bet you can tell I love my husband; I bet you can tell how much I love him. I marvel actually to think about how it was in the beginning and how it is now and how it is that 44 years in we are more in love than ever.

It is glory, really. Not the kind of glory that lights up the sky exactly, but the kind that comes from the knowledge in your soul and in your heart (as opposed to in your fickle mind) that you really love and are loved. It is transformative.

And that is why we have to learn to extend this love outward, to other people, I mean. As I write often here, we are God’s LGBTQ heirs, created in God’s own image, as people whose identity is in how we love. It is our job to lead creation in the propagation of love.

Like, there is this lady at my drugstore, a cashier, she’s easily my age … that’s all, I guess there is something welcoming about her because I always look forward to getting in her line and making a joke or two and chatting while we both muck up the “touchless” idiot-pad thing.

That’s a kind of glory too, those little interactions—the smile, the joke, the laughter—these little things create and propagate love. And that is the sum truth of glory, that it is not something outside you that you can find, rather it is inside you, waiting for you to let it out. And all it takes is a little bit of loving.

And with just a smile and a kind word, we behold the light of God’s love.

In Exodus we are told the appearance of God was “like a devouring fire.” Well, love is like a devouring fire.

At the “transfiguration” the disciples entered through that narrow wormhole into the dimension of God’s love, and there they were able to see Jesus and hear the voice of God, and to see the transfiguration that love commands—“a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your heart.” Peter says “you will do well to be attentive to this.”

Jesus says to his disciples, as indeed the angels said to the shepherds at Jesus’ birth: “do not be afraid.” Because, to be afraid is to be close that wormhole into the dimension of love.

And so it is we understand that our LGBTQ love, our precious love, the love we shareby with our life-mates, the jokes we make with passersby–it is this love that transfigures not just us, but all of creation all around us.

Last Sunday after Epiphany Year A 2023 RCL (Exodus 24:12-18; Psalm 2; 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9)

©2023 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Loving our Way to Righteousness

Today is the last Sunday after the Epiphany, and the last festal Sunday before Lent, the church often refers to this Sunday as The Feast of the Transfiguration. The focus is on the transfiguration of the Christ from Jesus the human as an act of the loving God. The Old Testament story (Exodus 34:29-35) tells how Moses was transformed whenever in the presence of God by the shining of the skin of his face. The shining of Moses’ face so frightened people that he would wear a veil in their presence, which he removed in the presence of God. The Psalm (99) is a hymn of praise that presents God’s victory as one of justice, equity and righteousness. The Gospel (Luke 9:28-43) is the story of Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountain top. Jesus has taken Peter and John and James with him to pray. There they all witness a dialogue among Moses, Elijah and Jesus, and Jesus’ appearance is transfigured “the appearance of his face changed and his clothes became dazzling white,” which the disciples appropriately understand as the manifestation of glory. The New Testament reading is from 2 Corinthians (3:12-4:2) in which Paul’s midrash on transfiguration hits the nail right on the head when he says “a veil lies over their minds,” but in the presence of God the veil is removed, there is freedom, and that all of us perceive glory as though reflected in a mirror, transforming us by degree from one glory to another.

Paul means that all of these stories of transfiguration point directly to the active embrace of love. It is love, that is God, that transfigures all of us, if only we can accept it by turning to it. It reminds me of the old concept of a knight in shining armor. Whatever that might mean to readers of classical fiction, it has meant for me over the course of my life the joy in the faces of the men I have loved. I have seen every man I ever have come to love as my knight in shining armor, whose very presence transfigures me with his love. When I recount the men in my life and their love and what it has meant to me it always manifests for me in the presence of joy and literally in smiles that transfigure not only me but the world we occupy. It is this love, shared, that opens the door to the dimension of the kingdom of heaven, which is a place we all can occupy if only we will.

As we approach Carnaval (Shrove Tuesday) and Ash Wednesday and Lent, we are living in a very complicated reality. After more than two years of pandemic many people around the world are beginning to embrace hope of a return to a life that includes socializing, not just Zooms but actual hugs and of course the warm smiles of love. And yet on the very verge of victory over disease we find ourselves living in a world where inconceivable war nonetheless is taking place. How do we embrace love as a paradigm when we face constant fear?

Well, how do we dare do anything else? We must all embrace love, we must love with every ounce of our being, we must tear away the veil that hides us from the pathway to God’s kingdom. We must love our way to justice and equity and righteousness, because this is the glory that transforms by degree “from one glory to another” from one moment of love to another.

Last Sunday after Epiphany Year C RCL 2022 (Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Cor 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a])

©2022 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Love Transfigures All

When my husband, Brad, and I were married the presider, at the very end, told us to say “I love you” to each other every day. I had an immediate recollection of my Dad and his last wife Maxine, because many times every day they said “I love you” to each other. They were a model to married people everywhere they went, especially after Max was paralyzed and they developed a sort of dance that Dad used to move her from car to wheelchair or from place to place around the house. As they danced this dance they sang a chorus of “I love you.” It was magical.

And so, married in the 30^th year of our relationship, Brad and I began to do as instructed, and to say “I love you” to each other every day. We’re still going strong 12 years on from that moment. The remarkable discovery for us was that the act of speaking your love is much more powerful than the simple conveyance of emotions. As our presider (and Dad and Max) no doubt knew, the act of saying those words, in fact, builds up the love, increasing it exponentially every time you say it. It is a powerful lesson about the power of love itself.

In Peter’s second letter (1: 19) the apostle writes: “You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” Of course, the metaphor of the lamp shining is everywhere in scripture, because the lighting of lamps is such a common human experience. We need to remember that lighting a lamp does more than change the ambience of the room, it enlightens by revealing the truth. The light shines to reveal the reality of existence otherwise hidden. Especially when the truth revealed is the power of love.

The lamp shining in a dark place is a sign of hope; the light draws love, which generates hope. The truth is that love governs everything. The presence of love balances life. The absence of love dissolves functionality. The dividing line between the darkness of self and the enlightenment of unity with God, creation and with each other, the line between life and disfunction, the ultimate line is the revelation of the presence of love. And we are attentive to the presence of love as it rises in our hearts like that metaphorical morning star, which happens when we repeat the words “I love you”

Both Peter and Matthew (17: 1-9), in the scripture appointed for today tell the story of the transfiguration of Christ. The most powerful moment in each account, of course, is the theophany that occurs in the sudden presence of the voice of God saying: “”This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”

Peter uses the metaphor of the lamp to remind his followers that the words of God’s love are the conveyance of “majestic glory,” moving people by the power of the Holy Spirit spoken from God. Matthew’s account tells us the disciples were “overcome by fear.” How reminiscent is this of the fear experienced by the shepherds who saw the star in the night sky over Bethlehem? Fear, after all, is a darkening of the human spirit by, on the one hand, powerful emotions that overwhelm reality, and on the other hand, the release of endorphins that prepare the body to do battle. It is the release of fear, the return of calm, that is like the lamp shining in the darkness to reveal the truth of the presence of love. This is why the angels tell the shepherds, as Jesus tells Peter and James and John at the transfiguration: “Get up and do not be afraid.”

A cloud, a shadow, then God, then brightness and shimmering truth—love revealed.

LGBT people hold the keys to this shimmering truth. Our very being, our purpose, our social role—all of this is defined by whom and how we love. Giving love is the essence of our existence. This giving of love is that rising morning star that can raise up the light and flood creation with the truth of God’s love shared among us.

Love transfigures all.

 

Last Sunday after Epiphany (Exodus 24:12-18; Psalm 2; 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9)

©2020 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Dazzled, transfigured*

When you were ever transfigured? Well, no point in begging that question, the answer for me, clearly, is when I came out. That first day, I will never forget it.

I had been working on it for a long time. We forget today how times have changed. I really can’t explain that part clearly here, except that I knew there were gay people and they were pretty happy and I was probably one of them and I just couldn’t figure out how to get from here to there. And then I had a terrible cold I think and had to stay home from work (it was probably the time I had walking pneumonia). So after I left the doctor’s office I stopped at that adult book store that I had never dared to visit before. You know what? There was a really nice young man working there and we had a nice conversation. I never saw him again … who knows, maybe he was the angel sent that day to guide me to my destiny … Still, I bought an Advocate which in those days wasn’t yet a slick magazine, but was a newspaper for gay men from San Francisco.

I went home and devoured that newspaper, and I subscribed to it, and I ordered some books from ads in it. And I eventually started to get used to the idea that it was possible to be one of these gay people. (Okay, sorry, context is everything—this was 1974.) And I began to get comfortable with gay men, who after all in a school of music were all around me, and I began to say yes when they invited me to things, like “come over we’ll bake cookies” and stuff like that. How overtly perverse! And then I fell in crush with a guy who was completely oblivious to me. We ate our cookies and went home (yes, they were really just cookies). The next day I encountered one of his friends on the steps of my library, and he asked me what was on my mind and I told him, and he took me home and the rest was history! Still is! Hurray! Too bad I didn’t write down the date.

But that day, I was transfigured. I became everything I was meant to be, not just scholar, but gay man, and sexual being. It was glorious. I was so brilliant not even Tide or Cheer could’ve made me more brilliant (ok, that’s a gloss on the Gospel, so if you’re curious you’ll have to go read it, I can’t do everything in one blog post!). And you know what, I still am. And there are no more closets to be built like Peter wanted to do to contain his prophets. And there is only God’s reality, to which we have been called, in glory.

So my friends, celebrate who you are. You, too, have been transfigured by God.

*Last Sunday after Epiphany (2 Kings 2:1-12; Psalm 50: 1-6; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-9)
©2012 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.