The Transfiguration has two youthful memories for me.
In 1970, when a guest at Palazzola, the summer retreat of the Venerable English College, I participated in their annual celebration of the Transfiguration, on the summit of Mount Tusculum. It was an apt, yet startling, place for such a liturgy. It provoked a sense of wonder. I was taken aback.
Over four and a half decades later images of the occasion spring readily to mind, still with wonder.
Celebrations in the open air often feel somehow more focused than in buildings. Why this should be remains mysterious. Perhaps on top of a mountain there is a greater intimation of infinity, and of one’s own smallness.
Yet perhaps, too, there is an enhanced sense of the wonder of God’s focus: particularly in this smallness our being held in the palm of God’s hand is borne in upon us more strikingly. Certainly, these feelings, more or less realised, were part of my response when wandering prayerfully, peacefully, round the summit after Holy Communion. Nor were they seriously hampered by the circling police helicopter, evidently alerted by someone disturbed by mountainous eucharists.
It is a pleasing conceit to imagine that on a clear day Monte Cassino is visible from Tusculum where on his mountain St Benedict took part in elevated liturgy.
The second memory is more explicitly Benedictine. It stems from a year later and is of my first visit to Bec, in Normandy, once the conventus of St Anselm. Quite by chance my arrival was just before Mass on 6 August 1971. The celebration was striking for its prayerfulness served and supported by word and music which drew but did not delay one’s getting oneself to the point. A different sense of wonder.
Both events were transfiguring in ways easier to recognise than to verbalise. There’s the rub: if unarticulated is one’s own experience registered?
It’s perhaps of some comfort that, irrespective of his sense of wonder, St Peter at the Transfiguration, not for the first or last time, did not quite articulate the point! He wanted to build tabernacles, no doubt an apt response for one in his time and place.
I wonder whether those responsible for the Church’s calendar have a sense of humour: the feast of the day before the Transfiguration is the Dedication of one of Rome’s great basilica’s, St Mary Major. Some tabernacle! But it as if by the next day, whatever the value, even magnificence, of buildings, we are invited to see that they are a means to an end, ultimately to move on from.
No doubt after due reflection, as well as experience of crucifixion, resurrection and ascension, all three synoptic evangelists stress one point which has resonances for oblates, “Listen……” — God’s word in their accounts of the event. St Benedict’s words early in the Rule echo this instruction, “My son, listen to the words of the Master.”
When we work towards conversio morum, our own transfiguration, perhaps we should grasp that a sense of wonder at the possibility God has created should be part of our response in faith. In the words of Dom Ralph Wright, monk of St Louis,
When
God
made
you
there
was
silence
In
heaven
for
five
Then
God
said
“How come I never thought of that before?”
Michael Berry
Oblate of Ampleforth
