Words from William Wordsworth, “Lines Above Tintern Abbey”:
I have learned
to look on nature, not as in the hour
of thoughtless youth; but hearing often-times
the still, sad music of humanity,
nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
to chasten or subdue. And I have felt
a presence that disturbs me with the joy
of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime
of something far more deeply interfused,
whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
and the round ocean and the living air,
and the blue sky and in the mind of man:
a motion and a spirit that impels
all thinking things, all objects of all thought,
and rolls through all things.
I love those words of poetry. I don’t completely understand them, but that’s all right, I think. Poetry’s often an attempt to put into words experiences beyond words, and that’s the feeling I get from these lines. I’m happy to live with an element of mystery: not everything has to be understood and measured, and sometimes the best experiences are right on the edge of what we can describe, or even beyond words altogether.
Keith might not agree. Keith’s a teacher friend of mine: a teacher of mathematics as it happens. Maths never was my subject, so his enthusiasm for maths is a bit of a mystery to me. He likes things to be precise and organised, and gets quite cross if for any reason they’re not. But one thing I can understand is his enthusiasm for teaching: why, through thick and thin, he’s been teaching all his adult life. “It must be pretty boring a lot of the time being a teacher,” I suggested to him once. “And it must be especially frustrating when you get people like me in your class, who just don’t get maths!”
Well, yes, he replied, of course being a teacher can be boring and frustrating. But what I live for, he said, what keeps me teaching are those moments when I see the penny drop, those moments when I see the scales falling from someone’s eyes. I get such a buzz, he said, when suddenly someone gets it, and it’s such a good feeling to know that I’ve helped them to get it.
I’m sure that in life we all have them: those moments when the penny drops, and we see things that bit more clearly, understand that bit more deeply. Times like that are sometimes called disclosure moments.
And among these disclosure moments are what we could call religious experiences, though maybe spiritual experiences would be better, since it would seem they’re by no means limited to conventionally religious people. They don’t just happen in the church or temple or mosque; but they’re moments when we not only see more clearly and understand more deeply, but also feel more profoundly, moments when we’re somehow specially sensitive to our surroundings and to ourselves: times when a story told, or a piece of music we hear, or maybe just the view from some hillside, just moves us. Times perhaps when tears spring unbidden to our eyes.
There’s a programme called “Something Understood” broadcast weekly on BBC Radio 4. I confess I don’t hear it as often as I should, but I’m often moved and impressed when I do get to hear it. Each programme takes a particular spiritual theme, and then explores it through speech, music, prose, and poetry. Quite often I find it not only moving but challenging. It’s not confined to any one conventional religious creed; more the sense many of us have that there’s more to being me, to being you, to being human, more to feel and understand and further to travel, than we usually grasp.
So, the story we’ve heard this morning: Jesus went up a mountain to pray, and on this occasion he took with him the three closest of his disciples - Peter, and the brothers James and John. We’ve heard their attempt to describe what happened there, what they saw, what they heard. Like Wordsworth’s poem, it was I guess an attempt to describe something that was really beyond words: a brightness that dazzled them. So was it that Jesus somehow changed before their eyes? Or were they really seeing what had always been there, except that up till then their sight had been dulled, they couldn’t see it?
The second of those, surely. One of my favourite poems is about the Transfiguration. It’s by the Orkney poet Edwin Muir, who isn’t read these days as much as he should be. In his poem the disciple says:
Was it a vision?
Or did we see that day the unseeable
one glory of the everlasting world
perpetually at work, though never seen
since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere
and nowhere?
In other words, what for a moment they’d seen was how it always is, or at least, how it always will be. Sin and short-termist self-interest dulls our vision. But for a moment Peter and James and John had seen what was always there and always true; their Lord infused with all the glory of his Father, just at the moment when he set his face to Jerusalem to take the road to the cross. Jesus knew what the disciples couldn’t know: that in Jerusalem there was a battle to be fought, a victory to be won, a purpose to be completed - the battle, and the ultimate purpose, the liberation of those held in slavery. For a moment the disciples saw it all, even if they couldn’t yet comprehend what they were seeing; just for a moment, then the light faded, and all was as before. Edwin Muir again :-
Reality or vision, this we have seen.
If it had lasted but another moment
it might have held for ever! But the world
rolled back into its place, and we are here,
and all that radiant kingdom lies forlorn,
as if it had never stirred; no human voice
is heard among its meadows, but it speaks
to itself alone, alone it flowers and shines
and blossoms for itself while time runs on.
And back down the hill go Jesus and his disciples: back into the world of time and tide, back to the world of scruffy and frustrating ordinariness: of challenge and pain and suffering and things not being how we want them to be.
But it’s in that world, in this world, that the kingdom has to be proclaimed; here is where the work needs to be done, here is where our love and care and compassion in the name of Christ is needed to make a difference, to win hearts and to save lives. And mission and ministry and witness is sometimes going to be a hard slog, is sometimes going to feel like too much for us. Things will get us down. But just now and then in all the struggle and the greyness we get a glimpse of the glory, a spark of angel-light, a sense of the eternal reality hidden from us.
That’s how I find things to be anyway. I’m glad of those moments when I just know God’s presence, when I feel the warmth of his love, when I glimpse the light of his glory. I can’t conjure them up; usually they happen as a surprise, they catch me unawares. It might be when I’m praying somewhere quietly, it might happen when I read or hear a story of quiet heroism or loving care; it might be music that does it, or light through stained glass, or birdsong, or a rising or setting sun; sometimes it’s just that I’ve experienced someone’s kindness or patience or forgiveness.
It can happen of course when I read the Bible; I’m amazed and delighted when a story I’ve read a hundred times before suddenly it strikes me in a new way, and maybe when I read it I sense God’s particular call to me.
I wonder whether like my friend Keith the teacher, God’s waiting for moments like that and loving to see them when they happen. When the penny drops, and when something of his love breaks through in a new way. When we get a glimpse of the great and eternal truth: that we’re already known and loved, that we’re already held safe and sure in a love that is forever, that is beyond this transient world of time and stuff. That the victory is already won, and we have a part and a share in that victory. And that love is what we are made of and what we are made for: the point and purpose of our lives and our destination at life’s end.
[May God’s holy name be praised in our Lord Jesus Christ and in the Church which proclaims and shares his love, now and to the end of the age. Amen.]
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