Transfiguration on the #3 train.

2nd Sunday Lent A 3/8/20 Gn 12;2Tim1; MT17:1-9 E 4, 10, 12 JMayzik SJ

It was cold and it had been threatening to rain sleet all day. The darkness of the skies matched the mood that had descended upon me.  The news was depressing—over a thousand deaths from the virus, the markets in disarray, angry arguments over politics.

I was walking back to Epiphany on the west side of Harlem, and I came across such a sad sight: a man lying on the sidewalk, his pants pulled down to his knees, surrounded by garbage. Two policeman were stooped over him, and a small crowd was starting to gather. I heard one of the cops mutter, “he’s gone”, and then discuss with his partner how to deal with the body. Someone called out, “can you cover him?”, and I wondered if anyone had thought to do that while God’s life still breathed in him in the hours before as he lay dying there on the sidewalk. Out of respect, I didn’t want to linger, but I tried to remember his face as I stepped away.  Despite the bedraggled whiskers, he had a baby face. One of God’s children. I imagined that face when it first presented itself to the world, and all the joy it must had given to his mama and papa. Oh, carry him home, dear Lord, I prayed. Embrace him in your shining love.

My steps were heavier as I journeyed down the island. I passed people wearing face masks, others with scarves wrapping enveloping their mouths and necks.

It started to rain/sleet just as I was passing a church, whose outer doors were open. I hesitated for a moment, and then mounted the steps.  I needed something to get me out of this mood, and so I entered.  It was nearly empty and quiet, one person at a side altar lighting a candle, another man repairing one of the pews up towards the front. I sat there for a while and tried to pray, but honestly, I didn’t feel much of a presence of anything divine.  I started thinking about being alone, and then about some of my problems, and it kind of spiraled down from there. 

I looked around the darkened church.  It reminded me of a church I frequently visited when I was in college. It had a painting of the transfiguration. Jesus, whose blazing, glorious face was oddly child-like, stood shining atop a mountain beside Moses and Elijah. Peter and James looked overwhelmed at the perfect vision of Jesus before them.

But there was one detail that was common to his disciples and Jesus himself. The feet of Jesus looked like Peter and John’s. And they weren’t pretty. I remember wondering if the artist had trouble painting human feet. But it was a detail that also endeared me to the painting and its subject because of the connection between the revealed divinity of Jesus and our sometimes ugly human condition. God breaks into our earthly existence and shares the pain and suffering and ugliness of our world with bad feet, and yet baby-faced glory.

I left the church, and the rain had become a deluge. I abandoned my planned hike home and retreated into the catacombs beneath Manhattan and its steel caravans packed with  other refugees from the storm. The platform was jammed.  A local train came and I piled on with everyone else.  We were like sardines, and I had to really search for an empty spot on the pole to hold on.  There were faces in every direction I turned my eyes---to my left, to my right, sitting just below me on the seats, across the aisle, over my shoulder.  All kinds, and types, and colors and ages.  And in almost everyone’s hand, a cellphone.  Who was playing a game, who was reading text messages or maybe even a book, who was listening to music.  We were breathing in each others air…from my lungs to that Latino boy’s to that African American mother’s to that Filipino baby on his mother’s lap to that white couple holding hands and clearly in love—all of us literally connected to one another by the vital molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and yes, vehicles of virus and other such imperfections and sins of our earthly existence. Our bodies literally crushed against one another as we feigned separation on our phones.

And just across the way, sitting in such a small way on the bench, an elderly gentleman.  He had no phone, just a cane that he held between his legs as he sat.  My eyes fell upon his left hand.  It was bony and heavily veined.  The skin was wrinkled and discolored in spots.  But what really drew me in was how it was shaking. I had seen that kind of shaking before in some people I have known and loved. Parkinson’s no doubt. A kind of uncontrollable shaking that in that crowded car of humanity went almost unnoticed—except for me.  I couldn’t take my eyes off of that hand.  There was something about how fragile it seemed, how vulnerable. I felt something stirring in my heart, and weirdly, I felt my eyes grow moist.  

I looked up from the hands to the face of their owner.  He looked at me almost simultaneously.  His face was lined from years of gravity and undoubtedly the labors of a long life.  His eyes were surrounded by wrinkles, even on his eyelids.  His nose, his cheeks, his small mouth, his tiny chin—it was hard to imagine the youth that had once been in them. 

But I just have to tell you that when our eyes met, there is no other way to describe it, there was… light. 

And dare I say something else—how is it even possible between two strangers on a crowded subway car?---but I’ll say it, in that shared look there was love.  I mean, there really was.  And for a moment it was just the two of us in that car and no one else, and it was all light and no darkness, and my heart was soaring.  It gives me goose pimples to even talk about it now. 

How long did it last?  Two hours, ten?  It was probably more like 10 seconds.  And on both of our faces, two small, secret smiles.  What was it we were sharing?  I don’t know, maybe just the sense that we understood what this was all about—this, us, everything.  What we were meant for, even if our lives were nothing counted in days.  It was astonishing, at least to me.  And of course no one around us was aware of any of it.

My stop was just around the corner.  I decided to be bold.  There was no thinking behind it, it was just spontaneous.  I stepped towards my friend, pressing against people on either side, and put my hand for a moment on his trembling hand.  He looked at what I did, looked up at me, and then slowly put his other hand on top of mine. And with a firmness I would have never guessed he still possessed, he gripped my hand. It was moment that I didn’t want to end.  Like Peter, wanting to harness the astonishing, spectacular experience of a blazing Jesus atop the mountain, I wanted stretch this moment out, the glory of it, the glory that others should see as well. But it ended, of course. He removed his hand, I removed mine, and we nodded at one another, that small smile still on both of our faces.  Two faces, both transfigured. Transfigured by whom? 

And then the train stopped, a hustle of bodies, and I reluctantly stepped off the train.  

I stood on the platform as the train moved away, taking my friend with it.  Up there on that mountain, James and John and Peter got to see the truth in Jesus, who suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree. The transfiguration.  You don’t have to go up to a mountain to be transfigured by Jesus.  It happened to me on the # 3 train.   It can happen to you anywhere as well.  May it happen to you, I wish it to happen to each one of you. 

Marilynne Robinson wrote a magnificent book called Gilead. One of the main characters is a preacher, who says this in a sermon: “It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life. . . . Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration.” This doesn’t mean that we should expect all evil to be redeemed in a singular spectacular moment of divine intervention. It doesn’t mean we should wear rose-colored glasses to avoid the work of living ethically in a broken world. It doesn’t mean that we will get to glow like Jesus or float in a cloud of glory.

It does mean that there’s potential in the most ordinary places for transformation. It means that grace comes to us in mundane form: bread, a word, water, the stranger, a breeze, a pair of skinny feet. The promise of transfiguration is that the glory of God transforms our world—and us—from the inside out.  May it happen to you, I wish it to happen to each one of you.