Morning star rising

A Reflection for the Transfiguration of the Lord

Find today’s readings here.

When I was a child in Catholic school, I remember the Transfiguration left me baffled. Jesus’ other miracles had a clear purpose. People were hungry so he multiplied bread and fish. People were sick so he healed them. A storm threatened his disciples so he stilled it. By contrast, the Transfiguration did not have a clear objective. In fact, to my childish eyes, it looked like an example of Jesus showing off, and that contradicted everything I thought I knew about his personality.

Only in adult theology studies did this miracle begin to make sense. In his Transfiguration, Jesus revealed to his closest disciples that he was indeed the long-awaited messiah. Many in Jesus’ day were expecting a messiah who fulfilled the prophecies in the book of the prophet Daniel. In one of the most vivid, found in this feast day’s first reading, a mysterious heavenly being called “one like a Son of man” receives three divine gifts—authority, glory and kingship—and uses these to defeat the enemies of God’s people. Many Jewish people in the first century used Daniel’s prophecy as a guide to investigate potential claimants to the title of messiah. In the transfiguration of Christ, the disciples beheld the second of the gifts, his “glory.” They did not yet see the fullness of Jesus’ true authority and kingship until the Resurrection, but in the Transfiguration they caught a glimpse of something that was real about him. Until catching that glimpse, they had followed purely out of faith. Now they had a little bit of personal experience that allowed their faith to deepen into confidence.

The second reading of today’s feast reflects on this deepening of faith. The passage refers to the moment when Simon Peter heard the voice of God declaring Jesus to be the Son. Up until that moment, he had believed because he saw in Jesus the fulfillment of Israel’s ancient prophecies. From that moment onward, he believed because he also had personal experience of Jesus as Lord. “Moreover, we possess the prophetic message that is altogether reliable. You will do well to be attentive to it, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts” (1 Peter 1:19).

I remember the day the morning star rose in my own heart, the day that I moved from faith to personal experience. It happened during the days when I was still trapped in active drug addiction. I used drugs every day not because they brought me any real pleasure—they had long ceased to do so—but rather out of some grim obligation. I chased the euphoria of early drug use, but what I got instead was a mere forestalling of the horrors of withdrawal. Even that sad duty was becoming less and less effective as my body built a tolerance for my drug of choice. I was moving quickly toward a situation in which a dose just to feel “normal” would be a dose high enough to kill me. I knew that day was coming soon, but I felt powerless to stop.

Then one day the drugs I used failed completely. I don’t know what I had put into my bloodstream, but it wasn’t the substance I had paid for. As I laid on the floor dreading the already coalescing withdrawal symptoms, a thought came to me, clear as a companion’s voice: “Mike, what are you doing?” The voice I heard in my mind was all humor and compassion. It was nothing like my normal inner monologue, which was relentlessly hostile. Instead, the tone was affectionate, amused and not at all afraid of the situation I had put myself in. It was so different from any of the voices in my world at the time that I immediately recognized it as something new, something from outside of me. Bits of Catholic education rattled together to help me identify that compassionate and confident tone as something divine. 

I wish I could say that I got clean immediately and remained permanently free of drugs, but in fact I continued to get high for several years more. Nevertheless, my addiction never again sealed its grip on me. Because of the humor and fearlessness of that voice, I knew that I would eventually come to freedom, and with God’s grace I have. I have never had such a vivid and powerful experience of the voice of God again, but I have found that the memory of that moment, rather than fading with time, has become more powerful. There is something of the eternal in it. That brief inner voice was the morning star that rose in my heart. That I caught sight of it at all was because I carried in my mind the debris of others’ faith, and that little bit of prophetic message was all I needed to give words to my own experience.

As I work today with sponsees and fellow addicts, I find that the memory of that day has transformed me. In everything I do, I try to embody that same good humor and fearless compassion. Sometimes people find it helpful. In any case, it is all I have, that fleeting instant in which I caught sight of God’s glory, heard the divine voice and beheld the morning star rising in my heart.

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