This morning, I intend to connect the story of transfiguration of Jesus with the sacrament of communion. We’ll all be coming forward to receive the bread and the cup. I wish that it were possible to get inside all of your minds and hearts in order to understand how you are interpreting the meaning of this ritual. I expect that there would be as many different interpretations as there are people in church this morning. That’s the beauty of symbol and ritual itself. It means different things to different people from different backgrounds and different life circumstances. I’ll offer a particular one that is meaningful to me.
Whenever light figures prominently in a story, it usually signals divine presence. It’s a theophany, which means an appearance of God. The story of the transfiguration of Jesus into pure light is like one of those modern-day time-lapse films. With the unaided eye we can’t see a rosebud open into full flower. We see either the bud or the full blossom. But with time-lapse film we see the whole movement from bud to flower, or flower to back into bud, compressed into a couple of minutes. Similarly, this brief story makes visible to us the process by which Jesus dematerializes into pure divine light. And when he leaves the mountaintop the time lapse reverses: the divine light materializes into the ministry of Jesus and his disciples. His whole ministry, and ours by extension, is materialized Light transforming the world.
It might seem a little far-fetched, but actually this is not a bad description of the emergence of the universe itself. The material universe is the transfigured presence of an original light. Cosmologists call it the Big Bang. In the beginning, there was a flash of pure, blinding light. Helium and hydrogen atoms are the first to materialize from the light. As they coalesce by the power of gravity, they form into galaxies, the galaxies give birth to stars, the stars to our solar system. A planet, located at precisely the right distance from our sun, gives birth to life. Every bit of life that ever emerged on the planet over the past 4 ½ billion years is the transfigured presence of the sun’s light. Then the same mind that is present in all forms of creation, blossoms in human consciousness, and we become that part of the universe that is able to consciously evolve. So, the whole shebang, matter and mind, evolving at the interior realm in the form of conscious awareness, and on the outside in the form of the material realm, is quite literally transfigured light.
And sometimes, when a remarkable person acts with loving and passionate intensity on behalf of the whole, we get to glimpse the process in reverse, (as we did with Jesus). Susan DuMoulin sent me an email last night describing her recent experience of our friend John Vaillant, who wrote the award-winning book, The Tiger. He was helping to launch the documentary that his book is based on. Susan was moved by his passion for the future of tigers, and his speaking out on their behalf, that she glimpsed the divine light shining in him. It is no less miraculous than this story of Jesus’ transfiguration. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the story of Jesus’ transfiguration and subsequent life of loving service to the world is an encapsulation, an iconic expression, of the entire process of evolution.
Physicist David Bohm said that matter is “frozen light”. We have two identities that are expressions of the one Light. We are both the presence of the light of the cosmos transfigured, (our creaturely presence) and we are the presence of the light of Christ transfigured (our divine, co-creative presence). Peter wanted to build three booths to mark the place where the transfiguration occurred. But the writer of the gospel says that he didn’t really understand. Jesus led them up the mountain, not so that they might immortalize three Jewish prophets, but rather in order to realize what they were involved with: what they witnessed in that brief experience was the whole sacred story of creation.
Communion, then, is one of our collective spiritual practices that is meant to lift us up into our Big Self, our Big Identity. We are brought to the mountaintop, and dropped to our knees as we realize our essential unity. We are one with cosmos (or the universe), and one with the Christ. We are the light of the Big Bang transfigured. We are the light of our sun, transfigured into human form and mind. And we are brought into the presence of the divine of Christ in order to realize our own divine light.
We do this regularly because we forget our essential unity. We forget that we are transfigured light. In our forgetting we start to believe in the story of separation. Then we build institutions, communities, and relationships upon the shifting sands of this illusion. This causes great suffering. This is why a particular movement within the communion ritual has historically been called “anamnesis”, which means re-collection, or remembering. We remember who we are before the forgetting, before the strangeness of the illusion of separation set in. We forget both our unity with the universe and we forget our unity with the divine.
It’s not too surprising that we forget. Everything we’ve built, from schools and universities, to our money system, and even church assumes separation. Some Eastern worldviews believe that this forgetting is itself the play of Spirit. It’s Spirit playing hide and seek with Itself.
It’s like Spirit saying: “Now I’m ignorant of my true nature. I’m this separate lonely creature. But wait, now I remember. What fun it is to remember. Those great aha moments. Such ecstasy! But that ecstasy depends on me forgetting this as well.” Hide and seek. This is a rather delightful model in ways, because it suggests that we need to lighten up just a little when we find ourselves all contracted and pinched, all worried and lonely, all isolated and angry at the world. In these moments we’ve just found a really excellent hiding place. In this state of belief in separation we might mutter to ourselves, “I don’t need you or anybody else. I don’t need this stupid world. Nobody knows me anyways, not really. And of course, we become really expert at finding unique places to hide. We find the furthest, coldest corner of this vast universe and duck behind a dark planet where nobody will ever think to look. This is when the hiding actually causes a lot of suffering for oneself and others.
At these moments we need to keep in mind, that while we may feel alone and isolated, in truth, by which I mean scientific, evidence-based information, we are already a communion event. It’s kind of funny actually to use language like, “I’m taking communion”, as though the experience of communion is conferred from the outside, by consuming a hunk of bread dipped in some juice. Remember, in this ritual we’re overcoming the illusion of separation, not actual separation. We are remembering our unity with the universe and with the divine, and we are re-membering, by which I mean reconstituting a new humanity, based on unity not separation. We are re-membered in and through participation in this ritual.
What am I talking about? The majority of us will walk forward this morning using our eyes to guide us. Think of the first creature on Earth who so yearned to see the light that eyes emerged! She opened her eyes and saw the light all around! It was kind of natural, given that we come from light that a creature would desires to see it. You carry that creature’s yearning for Light and her manufacturing intelligence forward with you in your DNA. You are not separate from her or her eyes. Our eyes are an emergent expression of those first pair of eyes.
Again, most of us will bring to the table this morning our brains. We hope that you didn’t park them at the door when you came in! Actually you will bring with you a nervous system that culminates in your brain stem. We have the flatworm to thank for this, having developed one of the earliest, rudimentary nervous systems. You bring with you a brain that helped you to eat, sleep, and procreate. Thank you crocodile and all our reptilian kin. You bring with you a brain that can empathize. Thank you furry, little mammal friends. You carry within you a new part of the brain that can make hard decisions, decisions that can override the messages from the other brains, make complex calculations, and plan for the future. This is a gift of the first African couple when it split off from our Neanderthal cousins.
You are already a communion event. You, and everything and everybody else share a common origin. And all of it, all of us are light transfigured into matter. That one light has manifested in amazing diversity. And all those diverse forms of materialized light were required to make you and me. An entire universe is gathered up in you as you partake of the bread and the cup. You are a sacramental expression of the entire universe. You are the presence of the universe in human form, being lifted up by the divine Heart and Mind, whom we call the Christ. All of creation is sanctified and blessed as it comes forward in you to the table. St. Paul once wrote that all of creation is eagerly waiting for the arrival of the sons and daughters of God to how up in their full glory. All of creation has been and is waiting for us to be a radiant expression of the all the evolutionary potential that was and is coursing through this planet. We are the realization of the promise that was inherent in all creation, just as future generations of humans will be the realization of our potential. This ritual is a waking up to the communion event that is the universe. It is Spirit in you, ecstatic at having found itself again.
In other words, this ritual is a procession of the entire universe, streaming up to the table, drawn by the Light of Creation that has manifested in all these magnificent forms. It is streaming up to receive this bread and wine in you and me. This is not an abstraction. It is a literal, bio-psychic-social-spiritual truth. You are that History of Life and Consciousness. And this is not just an evolutionary procession of physical forms. You also carry within you the entire history of the consciousness of the universe, as it has evolved through premodern, modern, and postmodern worldviews. Inside and out, you bring the communion event that is you into the Light of the Originating Source. I find it quite moving actually to realize that what we do here this morning we do as the universe, and more than this, we do this on behalf of all creation. All of creation is participating in this ritual, yearning for healing and wholeness through us.
We become Light by saying yes to the call to realize the promise of creation. That is how we are transfigured.
The breaking open of the bread and the pouring out of the cup symbolically represent the sacrifice of an entire universe, being broken open and poured out on behalf of the continued evolution of the universe. In this sense, Jesus’ own death is in alignment with the cosmic sacrifice. Nothing moves forward in evolution without the sacrifice of countless generations; of stars that go supernova; of our sun that burns 4 ½ million tons of hydrogen every second in the service of life; of the death of plants and animals and generations of humans. All of that life is required for us to be sitting here this morning. All of it has been a sacrifice on behalf of this Great Mystery of Life that is the transformation of Light into matter and conscious awareness. You are an emergent composite of all of that. And the only proper response to the magnitude of the sacrifice—a sacrifice that is still going on with every meal we eat—is first, deep gratitude, and second, a conscious willingness to live sacrificially ourselves.
At the deepest level of our being, we will never be satisfied until we give ourselves over to this evolutionary, cosmic and divine impulse to pour ourselves out in the service of this Creative Process that is life itself. Our soul wants to be part of bringing forth a deeper, richer, more elegant expression of the universe. Our life is basically the dance between ego resisting this impulse and soul surrendering to it. But we will never be fulfilled until we find our “solar self”[1], and pour ourselves out in the service of something much, much bigger than our frightened egos. When you burn with this desire you will have found Christ, the light of the world.
So this is what I’m imagining is going in when we “take” communion. With James and John and Peter, we are dazzled by the Light, the source of this Great Emergence. We are dazzled by the realization that we are that Light in human form evolving. We are dazzled by the knowledge that it has taken an entire universe and 13.7 billions years to arrive at us, and that we are already a communion event. This then is a re-membering, of an essential unity. It is an overcoming of the illusion of separation. We are dazzled as we awaken to the extent of the evolutionary sacrifice required for this ritual to be consciously enacted. And in deep gratitude we say “yes” to making of our lives a natural sacrifice to the future of the human species, creation itself, and our beloved planet. We are dazzled, but not confused. It all becomes clear. Spirit delights. What once was lost is now found.
