Jesus took
with him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain where they
could be alone by themselves. There in their presence he was transfigured: his
clothes became dazzlingly white, whiter than any earthy bleacher could make
them.
Mark 9:2 - 3
One of the ‘Luminous Mysteries’ appended to the Rosary of our parents and grandparents by the late Pope St John Paul II was the Transfiguration of the Lord. The disciples Peter, James and John are witness to the appearance of Elijah and Moses together with a transfigured Jesus. The image that often attends this experience is that painted by Raphael between 1516 and 1520. This high altar piece now hangs in Pinacoteca Vaticana of the Vatican Museum. I was privileged to view it and meditate on its beauty and composition when I visited Rome.
Yet as rich as Raphael’s expression is, it cannot contain the depth and breadth of what the disciples saw and felt, of the early Church and of our experience of the divine in our own lives, although his attempt is nothing short of majestic.
The Transfiguration, then, is not just a retelling of an event, it is the event. It incorporates the story of Israel’s salvation, the messiahship and mission of Jesus, and reveals the transformation that awaits us within the kingdom (the here and now) but which also anticipates our own exaltation at the end of time.
The Transfiguration reveals a part of the inner mystery of Jesus and part of our potential as human beings seeking divinity. Here is Jesus, alongside Moses, the redeemer of the Hebrews from their slavery in Egypt, with Elijah, the great prophet who worked miracles, who ascended into heaven in a whirlwind and who would return to announce the coming of the Messiah.
The early Church was in need of this affirmation and doubtlessly co-constructed this pericope to advance their understanding of their place in this extraordinary story.
As such the Transfiguration is my story too. It is about my journey. It is about raising my consciousness and awareness of the presence of Jesus in my life and his capacity to transform me into a vehicle for his Good News. It is also your story should you choose to engage in and invest yourself in it. It needs to be retold in your own life, as a story of hope, as fulfilment of a promise.
Raphael’s Transfiguration is most worthy to meditate upon, pray with it as part of your Rosary devotion,
but most of all – live it out in hope.
Peter Douglas
LENT REFLECTION by Anne Chisholm
Blessings may break from stone
Every week through Lent, a writer will reflect on a time of pain and
challenge, and what good – if any – came of it. Anne Chisholm begins the
series.
Bittersweet fruit of the womb
IN 1975, I inherited my younger sister’s son, Jesse. He was five years
old. In 2002 I inherited her granddaughter, Tabitha. She was one. And so, as a
consequence of two agonising premature deaths (my sister was 30 when she died;
her son was 31) I found myself, despite, as it turned out, being unable to bear
my own child, able to become a mother and then a grandmother: to find, in
stepping into my sister Clare’s shoes, two of the determining, demanding and
most joyful relationships of my life. Through death I had been given some of
the greatest happiness I have known.
I have often, over the years, contemplated this paradox, this
bittersweet gift. I have even wondered if it might, deep down, be a source of
guilt, as if benefiting in any way from my sister’s death should feel wrong.
But guilty though I often feel about all kinds of things, I do not and never
have felt guilty about this. When I think of Clare, and what she lost and I
gained, I feel first deeply sad for her and then a surge of gratitude towards
her.
Over the years, people have occasionally asked me if it was a difficult
decision to take on Jesse, whether taking on such responsibility was hard. The
answer has always been no; it was never difficult, because it felt inevitable
and profoundly right. This, surely has always been what families do, have
always done, if they can, at all times and in all cultures; someone steps into
the gap and tries to look after the motherless or fatherless child. Of course
such arrangements, as legends and fairy tales tell, do not always work out
well. In my case, though much happiness followed, there was also recurring
pain. No child, no matter how well loved and looked after, survives the loss of
a parent without damage.
Looking back, I can discern some of the particular reasons why Jesse
brought me so much happiness. I had always been more involved with him than
most aunts; while I was in a settled relationship with the man I was soon to
marry, my sister’s life was complicated and Jesse’s father had disappeared from
their lives when he was two.
As a successful model – she was a great beauty – she often travelled at
short notice, and we had been a second home for Jesse from when he was a few
months old. I was besotted with him from the start, and given that by the time
Clare died I had been trying and failing to have a baby myself, I remember very
well telling myself to be careful not to love him or need him too much, to
remember that he was not mine, that I had to give him back, stand back. And
then Clare became ill, and during the eight months it took her to die he spent
much of the time with us.
And then I did not have to stand back any more. There was a fearful
symmetry at work: a child who needed a mother, and a woman who needed a child.
Four days after her death, it was Christmas. We went to church, and the lines,
“Unto us a son is given”, made us both cry.
The fact was that Jesse, a loving, golden, happy child, gave us as much
as we gave him. He was always a charmer, easy to love. He grew up just as
handsome as his mother had been beautiful, and, like her, was drawn into the modelling
world at the age of eighteen. The glamour, the travel, the money were
seductive, and dangerous. There were drugs, a girlfriend with a cocaine habit,
temptations he found impossible to resist. He moved into the music business,
ran a nightclub, produced a record or two. We swallowed hard and hoped for the
best. He was always cheerful and affectionate with us but I suspected he was in
trouble. I was afraid.
Then, in his late twenties, he met Alison. Before long they were living
together and in 2000 they had a daughter, Tabitha. Later, Alison told me that
after Tabitha was born, Jesse promised to stop the cocaine, and for a while he
did; but then he slipped back, and she told him he had to leave. There was a
spell in rehab; it seemed to do the trick. He went home, went regularly to AA
meetings and found a new job working as a sound man for the BBC. By Tabitha’s
first birthday, in November 2001, his life was back on track. Tabitha had
already became my granddaughter even more simply and naturally than her father
had become my son. She was adorable. I felt very lucky.
Early on a frosty January morning the phone rang. Two days before, I had
put Jesse on a train back to London after we had been to a family funeral in
the country together. He was fine, happy at home and at work and feeling
better, he told me, than for a long time. We made plans to meet soon with
Tabitha and hugged goodbye. But that morning he had left home early in a
colleague’s car to film an interview for a BBC documentary. On a corner somewhere
in Lincolnshire in the dank winter mist, their car hit a truck. The driver
colleague was unhurt; Jesse died.
From that dark day on, after the shock that
for a while left me barely able to walk or eat or sleep, I knew what I had to
do. Again, it was not a duty but a compulsion; everything in me was drawn
towards Alison and Tabitha and finding ways to look after them. Again, the seed
of my own recovery was the existence of a small child who needed me, who like
her father was full of sweetness and energy, who was also too young to begin to
understand what she had lost until much later. Her uncomplicated love felt like
another gift.
Again, I was lucky: there was an insurance
settlement, and help with housing from family friends meant that Alison was
able to go on living near me in London. She and I became closer, and looked
after each other. In due course Tabitha went to good schools, where she shone.
As beautiful as her father, she was more academically inclined, so that
suggestions of modelling were not followed up, to my unconcealed relief.
Instead, she was so good at gymnastics that she took up circus skills and has
since been invited to train with the Team GB winter sports squad as a potential
international competitor. She has also started studying Psychology and
Neuroscience at Cardiff University. She is now twenty; I am eighty. She is the
light of my life.
Although the consolation of a specific
religious faith has played no part in this story, as I have little or none, my
cultural framework is Christian. I have always understood and often needed,
especially in times of trouble, the emotional power and beauty of Christian
language and imagery.
At such times, I read a lot of George Herbert
and John Donne. Not long after my sister died I found myself at a friend’s
house in Tuscany, looking at the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings I
loved with new eyes. Not all were soothing; my eyes were drawn less to gentle
Madonnas holding plump infants than to the terrors of the Massacre of the
Innocents, the limp, small bodies chiming with my fears for Jesse’s safety and
of my own inadequacies.
Then one night I had a dream, in which my
lovely sister, as beautiful as ever, returned to tell me, very clearly and
strongly, that I was not to be so worried and fearful. “I’m all right,” she
said, “and everything is going to be all right.” My own version, perhaps, of
Dame Julian of Norwich: All shall be well and all manner of things shall be
well. I had never been given to significant dreams: this one was almost too
good to be true. Rationally, I knew it to be wishful thinking, not hard to
explain away, but the dream gave me strength then, and has never left me.
Anne Chisholm has written biographies of Rumer
Godden, Nancy Cunard, Lord Beaverbrook and Frances Partridge, and has edited
the letters of Dora Carrington.
From The Tablet, 20 February 2021
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