You, too, are Beloved

This evening, I heard our chaplain, Nik Forti, preach on the Transfiguration.  I'm almost certain that this was Nik's third time through the sermon, but also probably his best.  The particular gospel passage appointed for today, the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, was Matthew 17:1-9 (NRSV).  This particular passage focuses on, obviously, the transfiguration of Christ; and while I'm no theologian, language is my medium.  So I'd like to offer a few thoughts that stuck with me after hearing the gospel and Nik's Sermon. 

Taken from the gospel, the text reads -
Six days after Peter had acknowledged Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves.  And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white.  Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him.  Then Peter said to Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.  While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said This is my Son, the Beloved; with whom, I am well pleased. When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear.  But Jesus came and touched them, saying, Get up and do not be afraid.  And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.  


As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead. (Matthew 17: 1-9).

Now, as I said above, I'm no theologian, so I would welcome all interpretations of this passage.  I don't know much about the reasons why this passage would be significant theologically; but as a poet, what I spend my life obsessing over and dealing with is language:  its intricacies, personality, and being.  These things interest me.  My own interpretation of this passage I base largely in my knowledge of how humans construct stories; what objects take on symbolic meaning and why.  For this passage, I would say that the journey up the mountain places it into a long standing tradition of culturally diverse stories involving mountains and men.  There's a reason that we still use the adage "a mountain top experience."  Some great characters throughout history have experienced extraordinary things while on top of mountains.  Legend hold's that Noah's ark landed on the peak of Mount Ararat, from whence he, his family, and the animals descended to re-populate the Earth after the Great Flood; Moses receives the Ten Commandments from Jehovah on Mount Sinai (or, if you're a Mel Brooks fan, the 15 Commandments).  In Chinese mythology, Qin Shi Huang searches for the elixir of life, believed to be somewhere on Mount Penglai.  And then, there are some not so pleasant experiences with mountains, like Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus, giving it to mortals; his reward?  To have his liver eaten by an eagle, only to have it grow back and be eaten again, for all eternity.  I mean, we're thankful Prometheus.  Fire is nice; just sucks that that's your punishment.  My only intent for this digression is to illustrate how mountains have played crucial roles in storytelling.  We can view them as metonymous for places where secrets are kept, places where amazing phenomena happen.  And I think that's certainly the case for this mountain story as well.  The image of earth raises towards the sky fascinates us, rendering us incapacitated and unable to escape its lure.  It's a symbol of growing closer to the divine; something we can use to enable ourselves and thus lessen (perhaps even close) the gap between man and creator. 

So here we are, on a mountain, watching Jesus be transfigured into the Christ.  For a moment, we are Peter, James, and John standing before the Son of God, when a voice descends from the sky saying "This my Son, the Beloved; with whom I am well pleased."  My reaction would've been the same as that of Peter, James, and John.  I too would have fallen to the ground "...overcome by fear."  Whenever a disembodied voice speaks to you, you can be pretty certain you're experiencing one of two things:  either you've finally had one too many Venti Americanos and haven't slept in days; or, you've just witnessed a divine act.  In this case, I'd tend to believe the latter.  During the Eucharist this evening, I shared this experience with those three apostles.  And no, I don't mean I had a divine revelation.  If I had, somebody may want to think about having me committed.  No, what I experienced was an unbelievable epiphany about the meaning of this phrase: "...the Beloved." 

Recently, I've been re-reading some of Gregory Orr's poetry.  Greg is Professor of English in Poetry Writing at the University of Virginia, where he founded and served as the first director of our M.F.A in Writing.  Although he's published numerous works (including 10 original collections of poetry), his most recent work is easily the most fascinating; he too uses this language of the body:  the Beloved, the Divine, etc.  Most specifically, I find myself thinking of his 2005 collection: Concerning the Book That is the Body of the Beloved and it's "sequel" How Beautiful the Beloved.  I had the pleasure of studying with Greg this summer.  It was then that I was introduced to this idea about the poetics of the body. 

In Concerning the Book That is the Body of the Beloved, Greg opens with a "lobby-poem", of sorts:

Resurrection of the body of the beloved, 
Which is the world.
                             Which is the poem
Of the world, the poem of the body.

Mortal ourselves and filled with awe,
We gather the scattered limbs
Of Osiris.
              That he should live again.
That death not be oblivion.

Phoenix from the Aberdeen Bestiary, ca. 12th C.

The first connection I had with this work and the passage from Matthew was the Beloved; God's Beloved, his son felt like Greg's Beloved, the conceptual.  He uses the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris to frame these lyric sequences.  Osiris, the Egyptian god of the Afterlife, the underworld, and the dead, exists scattered about the Earth; and so, to conceive of resurrecting a deceased deity requires us (the readers) to also undergo a death of our own.  We must redefine what it means to die and be resurrected, so as to escape oblivion

In the opening poem, Greg writes

The beloved is dead.  Limbs
And all the body's 
Miraculous parts 
Scattered across Egypt, 
Stained with dark mud.

We must find them, gather 
Them together, bring them
Into a single place
As an anthologist might collect
All the poems that matter
Into a single book, a book
Which is the body of the beloved, 
Which is the world.

Immediately we recognize that the beloved's identity becomes conflated with that of poems, language, and the world.  In the context of this poem, the beloved manifests as all these things.  What is so striking about this poem, for me at least, is how the beloved becomes the world and how the world becomes us.  We are the beloved; and Greg charges us with resurrecting the beloved.  Though not at once apparent, I feel that the legend of the Phoenix haunts this language, specifically in the "...dark mud."  The beloved has died and resurrects itself from the ashes, the dust, of its former self.  To begin the conversation in death and move towards life definitely seems counter-intuitive, but certainly forces us to reconsider the nature of our existences in time.  Moreover, starting here implies that we do not lose our sentience by death, but may actually regain it.   

With lent fast approaching, we'll soon find ourselves thinking about the incantatory prayer we've all grown up with "Remember that you are but dust and to dust you shall return."  It's cyclical, circadian, in nature.  We begin in dust, are formed, and return to dust.  These images become allegorical for Jesus' transfiguration into the Beloved when God speaks.  In that moment Jesus' identity suffers a death, then emerges as the Beloved; and like the Beloved, we also experience a death before we rise as beloved.


Tomorrow, and the rest of this week, I'll continue this mini-series of postings using poems from Greg's book as a guide.