Saintly Saturday: Transfiguration

David the ancestor of God, foreseeing in the Spirit Your coming unto men in the flesh, O Only-Begotten Son, from afar calls creation together to make merry, and prophetically cries out: Tabor and Hermon shall rejoice in Your Name. For when You went up into this mountain with Your disciples, O Savior, You were transfigured, making the nature that was darkened in Adam to shine like lightning once again, and transforming it into the glory and brightness of Your Divinity. Wherefore we cry to You: O Creator of all, Lord, glory be to You. — Great Vespers of the Transfiguration

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration — the moment when Christ reveals his divine glory to the disciples Peter, James and John as recorded in Matthew 17:1-9, Mark 9:2-8 and Luke 9:28-36. The crux of the feast is elucidated in the hymn above: the nature that was darkened in Adam is made to shine like lightening once again.

In other words, humanity is endowed with the image and likeness of God. We were created from the outset to be able look like this:

We don't because we refuse to see the image and likeness not just in ourselves, but in other people. So many of the problems that beset us today stem from this one sad fact.

I have been plodding away through almost three years and 300 posts on this blog and I keep coming back, I keep reading, I keep writing, I keep finding a reason to be creative and share what I create. A big part of the reason why is the people who exist in this part of the blogosphere. We are a contentious lot who have very strong opinions and who happily disagree with each other; however, I consistently find people seeing value in others and what they do. In its own, strange convoluted way, the OSR manifests what the feast of the Transfiguration is all about — finding that part of our fellow human beings that has value because we are made in the image and likeness of God.

Therefore, I'd like to take the occasion to thank everyone out there for making the world a better place.