Author: kenwoodley3

If mountaintop experiences were an Olympic sport, Peter, James and John would have won the gold medal after Jesus took them up the mountain to pray.

The three disciples must have suspected, or hoped, something special was going to happen when Jesus sought their company up the mountain.

But they never could have imagined watching Jesus’ face change as he prayed or seeing his clothes turn a dazzling white, or Moses and Elijah appearing and having a conversation with Jesus.

But all of that did happen.

Jesus and Moses and Elijah appeared, Luke’s Gospel tells us, “in their glory.”

In other words, they were “transfigured,” an event to be celebrate in two days—Transfiguration Sunday. Now, for a long time I thought the word “transfigured” meant someone was changed.

But it goes a bit deeper than that. It means to transform into something more beautiful or elevated, or exalted, depending upon which dictionary you consult.

But what does this Gospel lesson mean to us? Is it one more miraculous story that modern folks find hard to believe or relate to?

No, it shouldn’t be. However miraculous their mountaintop moment with Jesus was, what Peter, James and John experienced holds great meaning for us.

In fact, that meaning reverberates at the very core of what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. Transfiguration was not for Jesus alone. Embarking on the journey with our Good Shepherd offers each of us moments of transfiguration.

Not as witnesses, but as active participants.

Mountaintop experiences can, of course, take place anywhere. One doesn’t have to climb a mountain. You can be on your living room sofa, taking the trash to the recycling center or scrambling an egg.

Suddenly everything becomes clear. We gain a keen insight into life, into our spiritual journey or our relationship with God.

They are mountaintop experiences because we have felt ourselves transported a little ways beyond the material world, nudging into the spiritual.

We are elevated beyond the everyday experiences of our life on Earth.

Whether we realize it at the time or not, we all have been transfigured by things we do for others, acts of kindness or forgiveness that change—if only for a moment—the way we feel inside.

Our heart and soul feel transformed into something more beautiful than they were before we reached out to someone else. Transformed, inside, into something more elevated, more exalted.

But we are also transfigured by what others have done for us.

Our outward appearance hasn’t changed. People don’t look in our direction and see someone who is suddenly dazzlingly white. Nor do they see Moses or Elijah in conversation with us.

But, what about Jesus? Do people look at us, and see him?

I believe there have been times in all of our lives when we touched someone in such a way that they felt the presence of Christ through us, by what we said or did for them.

I know this is true because I have been on the receiving end of such moments more than once. I have been transfigured by the kindness and love of others.

So, transfiguration isn’t theoretical. It is literal. It can happen anywhere at any moment.

Virtually everything Jesus said or did can directly impact our lives in an experiential, participatory way.

We are offered transfiguration right where we sit, stand or kneel because the mountaintops that matters most are inside us.

Sometimes, however, that truth can be so hard to remember and too easy to forget.

Moments of transfiguration, like mountaintop experiences, are fleeting, ephemeral. They well up inside us like an overflowing emotion and then, like an emptied bucket of water drawn up from a well, they are poured away.

Sometimes the transfiguration is triggered by a moment in a particularly moving song, a painting, a passage in a book, a sunset or a sunrise. And then the song is over, the painting left behind, the book closed and today becomes tomorrow.

But each moment of transfiguration takes us further on the journey, and in a specific direction.

Those moments of transfiguration change the course of our lives and over the course of a lifetime that makes all the difference in where that journey takes us, who we meet and how we change the lives of others and are changed by the lives of others.

We won’t hear the voice of God say—as Peter, James and John heard God say of Jesus—“This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him.”

But if we are very quiet and still, we will feel God calling us by our own name, telling us that we, too, are his children, we, too, are his beloved.

God loves us before, during and after our small, but beautifully important, moments of transfiguration.

And love—both human and divine—has the power to transfigure us most of all.

 

 

 

 

 

CLOUD-WISE AND SKYWARD

 

I am the earth.

Rooted to this spot.

A river bluff blustery with leaves

waiting for wandering words to transform them

into places where trees believe in their roots,

a distant bank of clouds beyond sunset daring

to speak to us

about the light on the other side of them

making their edges glow like warmest memories

as I stretch out my hands to feel the hem of this garment,

birds flying through me,

amazed that I never saw the sky inside me

for myself

until now.

 

“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am humble and gentle in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
—Jesus

The weight is so heavy.
Too burdensome.
I don’t see how I can go any further.
No way.
It has been so hard for so long.
Years and years, it seems, so another single step feels impossible.
The valley of this shadow seems to stretch forever and the slopes that surround me look and feel too steep.
Each time I try to climb up and out of this, I slip and slide and stumble and fall. I am cut and bleeding and still this burden refuses to fall from my shoulders, fall away from my heart, or from my soul. Its weeds are everywhere and there are days when I cannot see my flowers. Can’t even smell them.
Today is one of those days.
The weeds of this burden blind me to even a single petal of one solitary flower.
And all around me are people on the same journey.
Carrying their own burdens that are too burdensome.
They don’t see how they can go any further.
No way.
It has been so hard for them, too, for so long.
Years and years, it seems, even if it has been a few days, weeks or months, so another step feels impossible to them.
The valley of the shadow surrounding them seems to stretch forever and the slopes surrounding them look and feel too steep.
Weeds surround them. Their flowers are nowhere to be seen. They can’t even smell them.
All of us have stumbled and fallen and the weeds seem certain to take every one of our blossoms away.
But, on our bruised and bleeding knees we pray.
Unable to gaze skyward any longer, we look down and see our bent and humbled shadow in prayer.
Prayer is all we have left, hopeless words searching for hope.
And that—yes, that—is when we see the second shadow.
A second shadow beside every one of us.
The shadow of someone carrying a yoke across his shoulders.
This shadow of the man and his yoke look just like the shadow of a cross, a crucified man somehow journeying right by our side.
Has he been there all along?
Did we mistake our burden for his?
Or his burden for ours?
None of that matters, we realize, as the flowers of this moment bloom, the sudden petals painting even the weeds into some kind of rainbow pasture where we rest and feel our burdens lifted. Our heads are anointed with oil.
In a moment, we shall all journey on.
Our burden won’t be gone but it will feel lighter because we do not carry it alone.
Jesus knows all about crosses.
That is why he can help us carry our own.

HIMALAYAN MORNING

 

My desert feelings can’t remember the flat line of their own horizons

and my valleys of shadow recall nothing

the darkness ever said to them.

I awake to an inexplicable altitude

and the music of the last voice I heard

before I woke up

echoing off vertical feelings that cover me

like the sunshine after it has lifted mist.

“Going up?”

The answer surrounds me, like the smell of coffee.

I yawn and stretch into the passing shapes of clouds

that seem to know just where they are going.

My peaks are everywhere.

At the end of a day’s climb

I stand upon the ridge of all that I have ever known.

The air is thin and bright.

I breathe as deeply as I can,

only to exhale in surprise.

A harmony beyond the sky has filled the deepest,

the everest part of me

and no matter where I look

I know the melody will go on forever

if only this afternoon

I can remember to memorize the tune.

Again last night I was certain that I never could

but tomorrow, once more, I believe I shall

remember one more note at least and this:

No matter what happens next

every note of the melody remembers every note of me,

even those that I have never heard,

the ones I must believe in enough to discover for myself

and then sing to my deserts and my valleys.

 

 

 

BUTTERFLY OUT OF THE COCOON LOOKING FOR GOD

 

My long and desperate sleep is over.

No more subterranean dreams about constellations.

Darkness slowly unravels and the stars see me shining

as if the sky is carefully untying its ribbons and bows

to stand naked and present beside me.

Everything has been turned inside out.

I open my eyes to speak.

I open my mouth to see.

I am neither worm nor angel:

just me,

stretching toward a higher place inside me and beginning to rise

on a breeze that feels like a hurricane holding its breath.

Anything could happen next.

All or nothing.

I am a fluttering brushstroke of seasons,

a water-colored apostrophe in search of the sentence,

or just one word,

to explain

how I got these stained-glass wings

and why I feel the pattern of your

fingerprints dusted all over them.

The one thing I do know is this:

Your touch is the only way I fly.

 

“Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

By Ken Woodley

LOVE’S SKIN GROWS OVER THE BONES OF A BROKEN SOUL

On the midnight panes of my shattered places

dirt had been carelessly shoveled.

An afterthought.

Words spoken beneath clouds that had never stopped looking like monsters

were filled with ashes and dust.

Then even they left,

leaving only silence behind.

Until God spoke.

With lips, tongue, eyes and everything

God could think of.

God knelt and smoothed the dirt of my grave,

making little rows for the seeds

that God began to plant,

explaining what was inside them.

No more tears.

Just rain.

And God didn’t keep me waiting.

Something green grew up through the soil.

Other colors followed the skyward urge.

God lifted my broken landscape from the gravity

surrounding places so empty they had been left

unguarded by those who had broken the reflection

I’d been born with.

Weightlessly sang the flickers of light

until all of their pieces fit my voice

and I tasted the first rays of sunrise from God’s tongue

upon my lips,

swallowing without regret.

I wore only the light

God shone from within me,

luminous and laughing joy

at this surrender of my fragments

to the oneness of becoming

something more than I

—more than anyone but God—

ever imagined:

Loved.

 

Sometimes the whole world seems to speak a foreign language that I do not understand.
Times when the whole world makes no sense at all.
Weapons are targeted.
Hearts are shut down.
Voices are raised.
Meaning is lost.
Darkness seems to be in control of every light switch.
I wander like a stranger in a strange land full of wandering strangers also lost in the senseless cacophony of struggles for supremacy and domination.
At those times all of the world’s words are closed to me.
There is no dictionary. No definition to explain it all. No meaning to anything. Just noise, noise, noise.
But no sounds that I want to hear.
All around me divisions are multiplying everywhere.
And everyone seems certain that God is fighting on their side.
Self-centeredly assured that God is in their front rank with a holy bayonet bared, God charging ahead to spare no one on the “other side” of the political, racial, idealogical, religious, social, cultural, sexual, economic—any—divide.
Forgetting, all the while, that every one of those divides is man-made, not heaven-sent.
Sometimes I imagine I am standing in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago in the days before Pentecost, understanding nothing at all.
I am surrounded by Parthians, Medes and Elamites, by residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and visitors from Rome.
But … then something happens.
Suddenly, the Holy Spirit promised by Jesus plays a note.
Just one note.
A note of such wonder that I don’t need to understand every word, or any word, that is being spoken.
Everything is being said—everything that truly matters—by the melody of that one note.
The borderless Holy Spirit opening all of our ears, all of our minds, all of our hearts with one true note so wondrous that it can somehow play a one-note melody inside us.
If we’d only listen.
If we’d only sing along.
Dividing every division until there is nothing left at all.
Nothing left at all but us—the harmony that God has been praying would one day fill the world.
But too often the hardest thing for a human being to do is open their heart and feel what God feels toward the people of this world.
Open their mouth and speak what God would say to the people of this world.
Open their mind and understand what God understands about the people of this world.
I’ve kept my own heart closed, refused God my tongue, and shut my mind often enough to know that’s true. And so I also know this:
A note of beauty needs no explanation, no dictionary, no interpreter.
It only needs us to understand and accept that God has planted the seed of that one-true note in all of us.
Without exception.
The world would make total sense—the sound of one heart beating—if we’d only let it.

 

“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord … the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good … All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.”
— 1 Corinthians, chapter 12
Each of us has a gift that we share with others, our own families and the world beyond our own four walls—a service we provide through the willing exercise of our God-given gift. None of these gifts is more, or less, important than another.
Even the seemingly simplest act of service—which might involve nothing that outwardly shines as a “gift”—is motivated by a keen willingness to serve. That openness of the heart is, in itself, a powerful gift.
A clear example of how every gift of ourselves given to others is important—and not more or less so than another’s—is seen through recalling the old-fashioned wagon wheels of the 18th and 19th centuries. Each of our gifts is like a spoke on one of those wheels. And each spoke is connected to the same wheel hub, just as our gifts come from the same Holy Spirit. Remove even a single spoke and the wheel is weakened and then one day breaks and the journey is delayed or jeopardized entirely. So every spoke matters equally. Just as every gift that God and Christ have given us to share is precious, a blessing to others, and to ourselves.
Our gifts, to look at them another way, are notes that together create melody and song, notes that have all been arranged by the same Composer and without which—even one missing note—the song would not be the same.
Look at our own hands. One of our fingers cannot pick even a penny up off the sidewalk. But when our fingers work together we can take a sword and pound it into a plowshare.
God gives each of us our own unique gifts so that we will work together for the greater good. The more we work together, the greater the good.

Nobody has all the gifts they will need to live a full and truly happy life. And if we did, how terrible to be alone with so many gifts and nobody with whom to share them.

Imagine being one of the apostles near the Mount of Olivet during the scene described in verses six through 14 in the first chapter of the Book of Acts. There we are, with the risen Jesus, who is giving us our marching orders: to be his witnesses, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to the ends of the earth.
If being with the resurrected Jesus isn’t mind-blowing enough, we then watch as he is lifted up and taken out of our sight in a cloud. As we’re gazing up toward heaven, two men in white robes suddenly appear at our side and ask why we’re looking up into the sky. Jesus, they tell us, has been taken away from us into heaven but will come back in the same way.
What a conversation we would have had during the day-long walk back to Jerusalem after this experience. Dumbfounded silence would have been interspersed with gushing voices falling over each other recounting what had just happened.
But, what had just happened?
In all likelihood, I suppose, the two men were angels. They match the description of the two who appeared to Mary Magdalene when she went to Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning.
The one thing I know better than anything else … the one thing I know best of all—is that there is a ton of stuff that I don’t know. This passage from the Book of Acts is among the many things I cannot explain.
And that makes me very happy.
You and I—all of us—need far more than what the human mind could possibly conceive. The transformation of humanity into a world of love and compassion requires far more than anything I could dissect and explain. Knowing that God is in the process of lifting us all toward one another—if we allow it to happen by not misusing our free will—is incredibly reassuring.
We can feel ripples of God’s movement, like a breeze against our skin or a river’s current and the pulling of a tide along the shore as we wade out together. But I cannot take the wind in my hands and hold it tightly, even for a second. Rivers and tides flow right through my fingers. I cannot begin to grasp the awesome fullness of what is happening and how it is happening.
There are clues all around but I cannot pretend to be Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot and solve the mystery before your very eyes.
God is on the case and I thank God for that.
All I know is what I have faith in: there is an awesome transformation underway and taking shape. It is, indeed, happening. The love and grace of God will eventually prevail in the world because it will some day prevail in our hearts. Prevailing in the human heart, one human being at a time, is how that love and grace shine like beams of light into the dark corners of the world, such as the Manchester, England music hall where 22 people died, some of them children, and 59 were injured in a suicide bomb attack Monday night.
The alternative, so often clearly illustrated, is darkness spreading one human heart at a time.
So, here we are. Gathered with Peter and John. Gathered with James and Andrew, with Phillip and Thomas. Here we are, gathered with the mother and brothers of Jesus.
Gathered with each other.
Something wondrous has happened on our journey to Jerusalem, and is unstoppably underway, that we cannot fully explain.
Or stop.
And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Think back, for a moment, to the best meal you’ve ever had in your life. Whether at a fine restaurant or cooked at home, with family at Christmas or over a campfire in the woods by a lake.
A meal that lives long in memory.
Okay, hold that thought as we listen to what Jesus has to say about the Holy Spirit in the 14th chapter of the Gospel of John:
“I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.”
Of the three figures of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit is the most difficult for many people to fully grasp. God we understand. Jesus we comprehend. But the Holy Spirit? The Holy Ghost? Ghosts aren’t part of our everyday lives. Except this one.
One can think of the Holy Spirit as a “feeling” that comes upon us when we are deep in prayer or, as can happen, when our mind is on something else entirely. A feeling that reminds us of God and Jesus, gives us a feeling of their presence and what it means in our lives, a feeling of inspiration, a feeling of insight, a feeling of hearing, seeing and understanding the spiritual more clearly, suddenly and sometimes only for an instant. An instant, however, that lingers in memory—like the best meal you’ve ever had.
Think of God as the Master Chef. Master Chefs express themselves through their culinary masterpieces. God’s back in a kitchen that is literally out of this world and God is cooking up the best meal we could ever possibly be served—an expression, or articulation, of God’s life-transforming love and grace. That’s what God, the Master Chef, prepared for us: love and grace that change our lives.
Now, think of Jesus as the meal, itself, as the way God’s love and grace were expressed and articulated into the world. God served love and grace to us through Jesus and the meaning and ministry of his life, death and resurrection.
But how does the Holy Spirit fit into all of this? Think of the Holy Spirit as the aroma of that meal that God prepared for us and then served to us through Jesus. Though the Master Chef, the meal and its aroma are three distinct and different things, they are also, somehow, part of the same thing.
Think about aromas. We can’t see them. We can’t touch them. But they sure are real. They are like spirits of what has been prepared for us and then served as a meal. They are culinary “ghosts” but we know for a fact they exist. We smell them every day.
The aroma of a meal is part of the meal, itself. The aroma comes directly from what has been prepared. The aroma of a steak is literally part of the steak. The Holy Spirit is no different, it just doesn’t have anything to do with a rib-eyes.
And all aromas do something quite special.
Think back to that best-meal-ever in your life. If you could somehow smell the aroma again it would bring that meal back to life for you. The aroma would remind you of every nuance, nook and cranny of that meal: how it looked, the way it felt on your tongue and, especially, its flavors.
That is exactly what the Holy Spirit does. The Holy Spirit allows us to feel, to “taste” the expression of God’s love and grace that was prepared and served to us through Jesus.
Jesus promised us the Holy Spirit to ensure we’d never go spiritually hungry. God’s love and grace are being served every day.
Simply enjoying the meal, however, is not God’s dream for us, nor why Jesus lived for us, died for us, and was resurrected for us. Being transformed by God’s expression of love and grace—even just a little bit—is why God brought all the ingredients together and invites us to the feast.
No degree of transformation is insignificant. Consider how one single comma or the tiny dot of a period can change the meaning of a sentence that alters the plot of a chapter that transforms the end of a novel.
So, dig in. And bon appetit.