Gifts from the Mountaintop
Dear Friends,
This past week, as I was busy preparing reports for our Annual Meeting, I was reminded just how far we have come in the past year, and at the same time, how many times we had to shift gears, in fits and starts, to arrive where we are. And what struck me the was the creativity, energy, and teamwork that has been born from this time of pandemic and constant change, along with a new way of visioning possibilities for our beloved community. For instance, if you told me three years ago that we would be offering options each week to worship in person or on YouTube (or, as they said in the old days, “T.V. Church”) and holding our Annual meeting on Zoom, I would not have believed you!
From my years of serving in organizations committed to developing programs and undertaking projects to achieve a goal, I understand the curious tension that the creative process (and life) asks us to hold: to claim and live into a vision, while at the same time remaining open to the surprises that occur—those moments when, after weeks or months or sometimes years, our faithfulness in showing up and tending the vision suddenly draws us into a dramatic shift, a new way of seeing and working. Even as we lean in the direction of our vision, the process asks us to relax our hold on our fixed ideas and habitual patterns, so that we can recognize what waits to emerge.
Our vestry didn’t intentionally time our Annual Meeting to occur on Transfiguration Sunday, which is also what we will be celebrating this week. Yet, I have found myself noticing the resonances and paying attention to what stirs for me in our gospel story of the three disciples who follow Jesus up the mountain to see him “transfigured” into the fullness of his glory as God’s beloved, only to follow him back down the mountain to the demands and sorrows of everyday life. So many times this past year, life has required us, in a painfully vivid fashion, to suspend our “visions of glory” and release what we have counted on most. As we navigate this next, new terrain of our shared life, hopefully moving from pandemic to endemic, we will continually be faced with new choices--in our commitments, in our relationships, and in our call to serve others. What do we hold on to, and what do we let go of? In all the changing, what abides? In the leaving and letting go, what gift still goes with us? How will we allow ourselves to be transformed by the transfigured Christ who accompanies us in every place?
The story of the Transfiguration is not simply about learning to leave the mountaintop, or about releasing what we have grown attached to. It is about opening our eyes to the fullness of God’s glory wherever it finds us, allowing that glory to alter us, and becoming willing to walk where it leads us. The story urges us to trust that what we have seen, what we have known, will go with us. It assures us that the gifts received on our own “mountaintops” will continue to illuminate us not only on level ground, but even when we walk in the valley of the shadow below.
In Christ,
Amelie+
