Before I was ordained, I was asked what I looked forward to most about being a priest. My answer happened to be the same thing that filled me with the greatest uncertainty: hearing confessions.
Everything else about being a priest seemed somehow already familiar – daily Mass had made me accustomed to the priest’s role, diaconate ordination acclimated me to preaching, I had already adjusted to our primary ministry to the students at our universities.
However, hearing confessions was an entirely new experience. Sure, I had grown used to being on the penitent side of the screen, but the idea of encountering other people in what seems their most personal details had given me pause. Would I have anything to offer?
But upon being ordained, I quickly found hearing confessions the most impactful and formative aspect of being a priest of Jesus Christ.
I’m a priest of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri and hearing confessions is a particularly Oratorian thing to do – St. Philip Neri did the bulk of his pastoral care within the sacrament of Penance. Even the time spent waiting for the next penitent has become a new facet of my spiritual life. More than any other time do I get to practice what Blessed John Henry Newman would call (in his Advent sermon of the same name) “watching.” I pray that I may have the same zeal as St. Philip, who would go throughout the streets of Rome to attract people to the confessional early in his priesthood, and later would “attract souls as a magnet draws iron.” To support such zeal, I all the more have to be rooted in intimacy with Christ in prayer, as St. Philip was.
In one of our confessionals, we have a small statue of St. Padre Pio. A few years ago, while I was still in college, I found Padre Pio’s Prayer after Communion, and since then, St. Pio has accompanied me through this prayer with every communion. And now, he accompanies me as a priest. I’m reminded when I see him there how his advice in the confessional was short but filled with insight, and I pray that I may have something of his depth or brevity in my counsel.
As a mediator of Christ, it is His mercy that I dispense. Behind that screen, at the intersection of God’s love and human misery, I have to make real the words of John the Baptist, “He must increase, I must decrease” (John 3:30). It’s His cross, His sacrifice, that I witness to, and I pray that I do not get in the way of his outpouring mercy.
More than anything, I have found that sins do not make us who we are. The priest does not see our deepest selves when he hears our confession; he sees our deepest selves when he gives us absolution. “We are not the sum of our faults,” St. John Paul II says, “we are the sum of the Father’s love for us.”
“That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That’s me. I feel like him. Like Matthew.” Pope Francis remarked in his 2013 interview with Fr. Antonio Spadaro, S.J.
“It is the gesture of Matthew that strikes me: he holds on to his money as if to say, ‘No, not me! No, this money is mine.’ Here, this is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff.”
In Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew, Pope Francis found the perfect image to express his own surprise at being uniquely called by Christ to serve the Church as supreme pontiff.
But, we have a problem. Which figure in the painting is St. Matthew?
(If you haven’t already done so, take a moment to give the painting a good look and try to figure it out for yourself.)
Besides the faintest loop over Christ’s head, there are no halos in this painting. Nor should there be – St. Matthew was only Matthew the tax-collector at this point. Here he is, in the midst of his sin and in corrupt company. Matthew has just as much chance of being called out of this situation as any of the five guys in the tax office.
But which one is he?
Option 1: The Bearded Man
At first glance, Matthew appears to be the man with long beard. His eyes show surprise, his face is illuminated, his finger seems to point toward his breast. And, maybe just to help us out, he has a distinguishing coin in his hat and a right hand fingering money on the table. If there is anyone in this painting who is reacting as the one who is called, it’s this guy.
There are two other reasons why the bearded man is the best candidate for Matthew.
First, Caravaggio did not paint The Calling by itself. With this painting in the Contarelli Chapel in the San Luigi dei Francesi Church in Rome, Caravaggio painted two other scenes from the life of St. Matthew: The Inspiration of St. Matthew and The Martyrdom of St. Matthew. In both of these adjacent paintings, Matthew is depicted as a man with a sizable beard.
The second reason concerns some of the interesting history going on at that point. Before this was painted, there was a passing fear that France might go the way of the Church of England. This fear partially subsided when the Huguenot (Protestant) Henry IV converted back to Catholicism upon taking the French throne in 1593. Caravaggio was commissioned six years later to paint three works for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi (St. Louis of the French). To flatter the now-Catholic king of France (and appease his patron), Caravaggio painted St. Matthew to resemble Henry IV. (You can see the bearded resemblance here.)
But that might not be the whole story.
Option 2: The Hunched-Over Man
People make a big deal about Christ’s pointing gesture just below the window in the painting. His hand is unusually relaxed for a definitive signaling of direction. The reason for this is very likely that Caravaggio is alluding to a more famous painting: The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo.
Michelangelo’s Adam is depicted in the Sistine Chapel fresco in the moment just before his animation, with his finger less than an inch from that of God. Michelangelo, instead of showing an Adam already filled with life, depicts the precise moment prior to his ensoulment with all the drama of a limp wrist.
Like Michelangelo, Caravaggio may not be capturing the moment of the calling of Matthew; he might very well be capturing the precise moment before the calling of Matthew. The finger of Christ the New Adam has yet to be fully extended, the call is only just about to happen. The whole painting is in that dramatic tension of the moment before the call.
In that case, Matthew is not the bearded man whose face is fully illuminated; Matthew is the man whose face is about to be illuminated – the smooth-faced hunched-over man.
And here, before the call reaches him – before the light reaches his face – Matthew is still a sinner, still a tax-collector, still fingering his coins and gripping his money bag. The bearded figure to his left anticipates the perceived direction of Christ’s soon-to-be-extended finger, pointing perhaps not to his own breast but to the hunched over man next to him. This man’s face, only half-illuminated by the light that comes from Christ’s entrance, still intently looks down to the table; he has but to lift his head an inch to make eye contact with Christ. Will his eyes meet the gaze that tests mortal men and will he remain the same? Will he respond to the call?
So, which one is Matthew?
It’s still not entirely clear. It can go either way.
But that’s probably how Caravaggio wants it to be. Caravaggio’s art was at the cutting edge of the subjective turn of modern thought. As a controversial artist of his time, he departed from the idea that art is exclusively at the service of the true, good, and beautiful, and turned instead toward an innovative realism. (See our earlier post on what makes art good.)
Part of Caravaggio’s goal is to pull the viewer into the painting. He wants this ambiguity; he wants you to be asking these questions. And he knows that things are not so cut and dry. Christ entered a world in chaos, a world engulfed in sin. He calls us out of that darkness and into His light.
Turning again to the painting, if we go to the source of Christ’s call and look above His not-yet-fully-outstretched right hand, we find ourselves at the base of a cross (the fourfold window pane forms a cross). Here we are meant to ponder Christ’s own cross. And at the cross, darkness appears to triumph over light, chaos over order, death over life. It is precisely at that moment when Christ conquers. It is from that cross that Christ calls His disciples, and it is to that cross that Christ calls His disciples. Like Matthew (whoever he is), we are drawn up while we are still sinners into the cross, into the central mystery of our faith.
Pope Francis (himself seeming to weigh in on Matthew as the bearded man) hits on what our response should be to Christ’s call: “I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance.”
Independent of who we decide Matthew to be in this painting, our response to Christ should be the same as that of Pope Francis. We are that sinner uniquely called by Christ.
How will we respond to His call?
Main image: “The Calling of St. Matthew,” Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1599-1600
“Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” (Matthew 17:4)
I’ve seen people give Peter a hard time for not “getting” what was happening in front of him at the Transfiguration. Mark’s Gospel says parenthetically “he hardly knew what to say – they were so frightened.” But I think we need to give our first pope some credit where credit is due.
Peter was thinking quickly on his feet. So he intrudes into the conversation and asks whether he should build three tents. For us, this sounds odd, but for Peter, he must have thought he had solved the problem: this had to be the beginning of the end times. He might have picked up on how Jesus is fulfilling the Old Testament festivals. He knew of the Jewish tradition that Moses and Elijah would come again before the end of the world. Now, since they’ve come, he was hoping Christ was finally going to restore the kingdom of Israel and reap the much-anticipated harvest of souls. It was the Christological fulfillment of the Jewish Festival of Booths.
They needed tents.
The Festival of Booths (Feast of Tabernacles / Sukkoth) is one of the three major feasts in the Jewish calendar (Leviticus 23:39). For a week, they would dwell outside in tents (“booths”) for seven days, reminiscent of their time dwelling in tents during their exodus sojourn. The timing of the Festival of Booths corresponded with a yearly grain harvest, wherein whole communities would work day and night (with the aid of a full moon) to gather in the harvest and do the work of threshing the grain. Removed from its initial agricultural context, the Festival Booths still looked forward to the harvest that was to come at the end of time. Although Peter’s exclamation of “Lord, it is good that we are here” is a fitting expression of eschatological rest, the tent-building suggestion might have been a little too much.
Peter figured out pretty well what was going on. However, Peter still did not know what he was saying. Where Peter erred was not his analysis – the event of the Transfiguration is the fulfillment of the Jewish Festival of Booths – but his approach.
Peter approached the Transfiguration as a problem to be solved, not as a mystery to be entered into.
The Meaning of Mystery
So when Christians use the word “mystery,” we do not mean a problem without an answer. No, for Christians, a mystery is something that is so intensely knowable that it exceeds the powers of human comprehension. A mystery is so great that it encompasses the subject.
With a little help from the French personalist philosopher Gabriel Marcel, we should distinguish between “mystery” and its misused synonym “problem.” For Marcel, something is a mystery when the self is implicated in it. A mystery cannot be studied from a distance, but is experienced by entering further into it. Openness to mystery is openness to the whole of a reality.
Gabriel Marcel, French Catholic Philosopher, 1889-1973
A “problem,” on the other hand, is something that “is placed in front of me, blocking my way.” To treat something as a problem is to purposely exclude yourself from it. It is a purely notional engaging of a situation, wherein one can find objective and finite answers with universal implications.
Problems are the stuff of scientists. Mysteries are the stuff of mystics.
Let me give you an example.
Once, my five-year old niece told me, “Did you know that, when I’m in the car, the moon follows me? It really does!”
Infected as I was by the spirit of abstraction, I told her, “It only looks like it is following you because it’s so far away.” I thought I could maybe explain to her how perspective works at such distances. To prove this, I thought I could set up an experiment, putting her in one car and her sister in another car. They would go separate directions and observe how the moon follows both of them. Then I could prove to my niece that, since the moon cannot possibly be following both of them, there must be another explanation. That explanation would be in the reality of the great distance between the earth and the moon, a distance that can be observed and measured. Science would win out over childish naïveté.
But before I could get anywhere to disprove her childish notion, she interrupted, “NO. The moon really follows me.”
In the face of such opposition, I thus abandoned my attempt to scientifically disprove her childish perception.
For my five-year old niece, the moon was a mystery; it really did follow her. The moon was so beyond her that, rather than disconnecting her, it implicated her in its path. However mistaken her understanding of perspective, she approached it with wonder. And she rightly would not let that wonder be extinguished.
To me, the moon was a problem that needed to be solved; it could be measured and placed conceptually at a distance. I knew that its movements and phases are configured to a different pattern than my sporadic movements. Instead of encountering the moon with her, I abstracted. Although technically correct (the moon does not follow you), my approach prevented me from being gripped by the mystery of the moon and sharing in my niece’s wonder.
Like my niece with the moon, a mystery is so beyond us, that we cannot help but be pulled into it. A mystery is so large that it necessarily involves the viewer.
In this way, God Himself is a mystery, being so far beyond us that, at the same time, He embraces us and loves us in our very being.
The Mystery of the Transfiguration
It is in this way that the event of the Transfiguration is a mystery.
Since mysteries overwhelm us, they implicate us – they require our response. Our response, then, to the mystery of the Transfiguration is not to solve the puzzle of Moses and Elijah’s appearance, but to enter deeply into the reality of what is before us.
Although technically correct, Peter’s approach prevented him from being gripped by the mystery. So while Peter was still speaking, a higher voice interrupts him: “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.”
Through the mystery of the Transfiguration, we are meant to share in Jesus’ own prayer with the Father. By beholding the glory of Christ transfigured and listening to him, we become sons and daughters in the Son. By entering in to the mystery of the Transfiguration – by listening to God’s beloved Son – we become what we contemplate.
How do we enter in to the mystery of the Transfiguration? For us Christians, we go to the source and the summit of the Christian life – the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Like Peter at the Transfiguration, we can look at the Mass just as a problem to be solved, a ritual to be analyzed, a puzzle to be deciphered. Or we can enter into the mystery of the Mass.
In every celebration of the Mass, we ascend the mountain with Christ, and we encounter something that overwhelms our understanding: God incarnate – the second Person of the Holy Trinity – comes to us as bread and wine. So great is the glory of Christ in the Eucharist, so utterly beyond us, that we are pulled into the mystery. The altar is our Mount Tabor, where we see His glory, not with the eyes of flesh, but with the eyes of faith. Over the altar the Father’s voice mystically resounds, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.” We who enter into this mystery by receiving the Body of Christ in Holy Communion are enveloped by the cloud of the Holy Spirit. At Mass, we enter in to the mystery of God’s glory. He gazes on us, and we gaze on Him, and we become what we contemplate.
It is good that we are here.
Post by: Fr. Peter Gruber
Main Image: The Church of the Transfiguration, Mount Tabor
So much of who we are comes from our mothers. We are who we are in relation to others – and the first relationship we had was being nestled nine months in our mother’s womb.
“Male and female He created them” – it is fitting that with these words our first parents are introduced, since our first experience of gender, our first experience of male and female, comes – not from our analysis of gender roles in society – but really and concretely, from our mother and our father.
“God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female he created them.” Because we are male, because we are female, we are in the image of God. We are not made in the image of God as mere androgynous souls with consciousness; rather, we are embodied in our masculinity and our femininity. Our lives are circumscribed between motherhood and fatherhood – none of us comes into this world without a natural father, none of us comes into this world without a natural mother.
In a time hidden from our memories, that initial relationship with our mothers forms us at the core of who we are. No person has ever grown to maturity without first passing through their mother’s body. Try as they might, technology still has yet to eclipse biology.
(If you want to be overwhelmed with all the particulars of gestational biology, check out this video.)
From the first moment of our existence in the womb of our mother, we are surrounded by her, enveloped in her body. Her body supplies for every one of our needs. As our cells divide and develop, our blood takes nourishment and oxygen from her blood; there is an exchange of life. By the time a mother is aware she is with child, her maternal body has known this already for weeks. Before she feels the budding movements of the child’s limbs, she is already being moved by the child – morning sickness, new diet, the maternal nesting instinct to tackle stale projects. But more than that, her whole life receives a new trajectory; she holds a person within her – two souls in one body.
I recall an experience of a friend of mine when his wife was pregnant with their first child. He came back from work one day to find his pregnant wife lying on her bed with her hands over her womb, filled with wonder. She explained to her husband that she felt her baby move for the first time and was overwhelmed with the realization of her motherhood, explaining to her husband, “I am not alone in my own body.”
A mother after having her first child will often comment that, had she known how much of herself would have been taken in order to love her child, she would not have thought herself capable of giving so much of herself. Motherhood is an experience that requires all of her. It is a self-emptying love that cares fiercely and intimately for her child.
Maternity, femininity, female-ness – this is our first experience of gender; it is our first experience of life. We are born into – conceived into – this relationship with our mother. It is most natural to us. It is the strongest and longest lasting of human bonds. It is a natural communion. For the rest of their lives, the mother and child will retain something of that intimacy where they were truly two souls in one body.
Beginning from this indescribable intimacy, the child goes through a development. Birth requires a leaving behind of the original closeness of the mother. The dependence of the child on the mother continues – nourishment, locomotion, comfort, bathroom issues – but slowly begins to wane. When the child learns to crawl, a mother is pained to see his reliance on her lessened. When the child takes his first steps, every step is a step away from the mother. Motherhood is tinged with sadness. Watching her child grow apart from her requires all of that self-emptying love.
In my own mother, I’ve seen this self-emptying love every time a sibling leaves my parents’ house to depart for college – fourteen times (I have a big family) one of her children left home, fourteen times she’s cried.
A mother’s vocation begins in intimacy, and ends in separation.
A mother’s love makes room for the child to grow. All human life takes as its origin the intimacy of motherhood. Fatherhood completes the picture.
***
We see this reality of maternal separation lived out most radically in the life of our Blessed Mother. Jesus shared a hidden intimacy with Mary for nine months. At his birth, the shepherds find Him, not wrapped in the arms of His immaculate mother, but wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger – apart from her. When He is twelve, after being lost for three days in the Temple, He tells her “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49) At Cana, He begins His public ministry with what looks like a rebuke, “Woman, what have you to do with me?” Once while Jesus was close by, Mary tried to get through the crowd to see her Son, and He says, “Who are my mother and my brethren? Here are my mother and my brethren! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.” (Mark 3:33-35) Even at the foot of the cross, when she is with Him again, He gives her away, saying to her “Woman, behold, your son” and to St. John, “Behold, your mother.” (John 19:26-27) And then He undergoes the ultimate separation, giving up His spirit and dying on the Cross.
Here, we let Blessed John Henry Newman take over, with his reflection on the Thirteenth Station of the Cross:
He is Thy property now, O Virgin Mother, once again, for He and the world have met and parted. He went out from Thee to do His Father’s work – and He has done and suffered it. Satan and bad men have now no longer any claim upon Him – too long has He been in their arms. Satan took Him up aloft to the high mountain; evil men lifted Him up upon the Cross. He has not been in Thy arms, O Mother of God, since He was a child – but now thou hast a claim upon Him, when the world has done its worst. For thou art the all-favoured, all-blessed, all-gracious Mother of the Highest. We rejoice in this great mystery. He has been hidden in thy womb, He has lain in thy bosom, He has been suckled at thy breasts, He has been carried in thy arms – and now that He is dead, He is placed upon thy lap.
Virgin Mother of God, pray for us.
Main image: “Virgin of the Angels,” William Adolphe Bouguereau, 1881
Post by: Deacon Peter Gruber
“That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That’s me. I feel like him. Like Matthew.” Pope Francis remarked in his 2013 interview with Fr. Antonio Spadaro, S.J.
“It is the gesture of Matthew that strikes me: he holds on to his money as if to say, ‘No, not me! No, this money is mine.’ Here, this is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff.”
In Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew, Pope Francis found the perfect image to express his own surprise at being uniquely called by Christ to serve the Church as supreme pontiff.
But, we have a problem. Which figure in the painting is St. Matthew?
(If you haven’t already done so, take a moment to give the painting at top a good look and try to figure it out for yourself.)
Besides the faintest loop over Christ’s head, there are no halos in this painting. Nor should there be – St. Matthew was only Matthew the tax-collector at this point. Here he is, in the midst of his sin, and in corrupt company. Matthew has just as much chance of being called out of this situation as any of the five guys in the tax office.
So, which one is he?
Option 1: The Bearded Man
At first glance, Matthew appears to be the man with long beard. His eyes show surprise, his face is illuminated, his finger seems to point toward his breast. And, maybe just to help us out, he has a distinguishing coin in his hat and a right hand fingering money on the table. If there is anyone in this painting who is reacting as the one who is called, it’s this guy.
There are two other reasons why the bearded man is the best candidate for Matthew.
First, Caravaggio did not paint The Calling by itself. With this painting in the Contarelli Chapel in the San Luigi dei Francesi Church in Rome, Caravaggio painted two other scenes from the life of St. Matthew: The Inspiration of St. Matthew and The Martyrdom of St. Matthew. In both of these adjacent paintings, Matthew is depicted as a man with a sizable beard.
The second reason concerns some of the interesting history going on at that point. Before this was painted, there was a passing fear that France might go the way of the Church of England. This fear partially subsided when the Huguenot (Protestant) Henry IV converted back to Catholicism upon taking the French throne in 1593. Caravaggio was commissioned six years later to paint three works for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi (St. Louis of the French). To flatter the now-Catholic king of France (and appease his patron), Caravaggio painted St. Matthew to resemble Henry IV. (You can see the bearded resemblance here.)
But that might not be the whole story.
Option 2: The Hunched-Over Man
People make a big deal about Christ’s pointing gesture just below the window in the painting. His hand is unusually relaxed for a definitive signaling of direction. The reason for this is very likely that Caravaggio is alluding to a more famous painting: The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo.
Michelangelo’s Adam is depicted in the Sistine Chapel fresco in the moment just before his animation, with his finger less than an inch from that of God. Michelangelo, instead of showing an Adam already filled with life, depicts the precise moment prior to his ensoulment with all the drama of a limp wrist.
Like Michelangelo, Caravaggio is not capturing the moment of the calling of Matthew; he is capturing the precise moment before the calling of Matthew. The finger of Christ the New Adam has yet to be fully extended, the call is only just about to happen. The whole painting is in that dramatic tension of the moment before the call. If Matthew is the hunched-over man at the end of the painting, it almost would be more accurate to call it The Moment before the Calling of St. Matthew.
And here, Matthew is still a sinner, still a tax-collector, still fingering his coins and gripping his money bag. The bearded figure to his left echoes the perceived direction of Christ’s soon-to-be-extended finger, pointing not to his own breast but to the hunched over man next to him. This man’s face, only half-illuminated by the light that comes from Christ’s entrance, still intently looks down to the table; he has but to lift his head an inch to make eye contact with Christ. Will his eyes meet the gaze that tests mortal men and will he remain the same? Will he respond to the call?
So, which one is Matthew?
It’s still not entirely clear.
But that’s probably how Caravaggio wants it to be. Caravaggio’s art was at the cutting edge of the subjective turn of modern thought. As a controversial artist of his time, he departed from the idea that art is exclusively at the service of the true, good, and beautiful, and turned instead toward an innovative realism. (Remember our earlier post on what makes art good.)
Part of Caravaggio’s goal is to pull the viewer into the painting. He wants this ambiguity; he knows that things are not so cut and dry in this world. Christ entered a world in chaos, a world engulfed in sin. He calls us out of that darkness and into His light.
Turning again to the painting, if we go to the source of Christ’s call and look above His outstretched right hand, we are at the foot of the cross (the fourfold window pane forms a cross). At that cross, at our Lord’s ultimate crucifixion, darkness appears to triumph over light, chaos over order, death over life.
But it is precisely at that moment when Christ conquers. It is from that cross that Christ calls His disciples, and it is to that cross that Christ calls His disciples. We are drawn up while we are still sinners into the cross, into the central mystery of our faith.
Pope Francis, without weighing in on the identity of Caravaggio’s Matthew, hits on what our response should be to Christ’s call: “I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance.”
Independent of who we decide Matthew to be in this painting, our response to Christ should be the same as that of Pope Francis. We are that sinner uniquely called by Christ. How will we respond to His call?
Main image: “The Calling of St. Matthew,” Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1599-1600
“Master, it is good that we are here; let us make three tents, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” (Luke 9:33)
Peter had two options for approaching the event of the Transfiguration: he could see it as (a) a problem that needs to be solved, or (b) as a mystery.
When Jesus led Peter, James, and John up the high mountain, they woke up to a scene that seemed to defy all understanding. Jesus brings them up to the top of Mount Tabor and begins to glow unworldly bright. Then Moses and Elijah from the Old Testament show up and all three of them have a conversation.
Peter, thinking quickly on his feet, intrudes into their conversation and asks whether he should build three tents. For us, this sounds like odd, but for Peter, he must have thought he had solved the problem: this had to be the beginning of the end times. He might have picked up on how Jesus is fulfilling the Old Testament festivals. He knew of the Jewish tradition that Moses and Elijah would come again before the end of the world. Jesus, along with Moses and Elijah, was finally going to restore the kingdom of Israel and reap the much-anticipated harvest of souls. It was the Christological fulfillment of the Jewish Festival of Booths.
They needed tents.
However, Peter “did not know what he was saying.” He approached the Transfiguration as a problem to be solved, not as a mystery to be entered into. So while Peter was still speaking, a higher voice corrected him: “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.”
The Limits of Science
When Christians use the word “mystery,” we do not mean a problem without an answer. No, for Christians, a mystery is something that is so intensely knowable that it exceeds the powers of human comprehension.
Let me give you an example.
Once, my five-year old niece told me, “Did you know that, when I’m in the car, the moon follows me? It really does!” My immediate response was to try to explain to her that since the moon is so far away, it only looks like it is following her. My impulse was to set up an experiment, putting her in one car and her sister in another car. They would go separate directions and observe how the moon follows both of them. Then I could prove to my niece that, since the moon cannot possibly be following both of them, there must be another explanation. That explanation would be in the reality of the great distance between the earth and the moon, a distance that can be observed and measured. Science would win out over childish naïveté.
But before I could thoroughly disprove her childish notion, she interrupted, “No. The moon really follows me.” With such opposition, I thus abandoned my attempt to scientifically disprove her childish perception.
For my five-year old niece, the moon was a mystery; it really did follow her. The moon was so beyond her that, rather than disconnecting her, it implicated her in its path. However mistaken her understanding of perspective, she approached it with wonder. And she rightly would not let that wonder be extinguished.
To me, the moon was a problem that needed to be solved; it could be measured and placed conceptually at a distance. I knew that its movements and phases are configured to a different pattern than my sporadic movements. Although technically more correct, the approach that reduced the moon to a problem prevented me from being gripped by the mystery of the moon and sharing in my niece’s wonder. To my niece, however, the moon was a mystery to be entered into.
Like my niece with the moon, a mystery is so beyond us, that we cannot help but be pulled into it. A mystery is so large that it necessarily involves the viewer. In this way, God Himself is a mystery, being so far beyond us that, at the same time, He embraces us and loves us in our very being.
Mysteries are not problems; they are not to be solved – they are to be entered into. A mystery is like a piece of art that pulls the viewer in; it is not a mere opportunity for scientific analysis.
The Mystery of the Transfiguration
It is in this way that the event of the Transfiguration is a mystery. Since mysteries overwhelm us, they implicate us – they require our response. Our response, then, to the mystery of the Transfiguration is not to solve the puzzle of Moses and Elijah’s appearance, but to enter deeply into the reality of what is before us. Through the mystery of the Transfiguration, we share in Jesus’ own prayer with the Father. By beholding the glory of Christ transfigured and listening to him, we become sons and daughters in the Son. By entering in to the mystery of the Transfiguration – by listening to God’s chosen Son – we become what we contemplate.
How do we enter in to the mystery of the Transfiguration? For us Christians, we go to the source and the summit of the Christian life – the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Like Peter at the Transfiguration, we can look at the Mass just as a problem to be solved, a ritual to be analyzed, a puzzle to be deciphered. Or we can enter into the mystery of the Mass.
In every celebration of the Mass, we ascend the mountain with Christ, and we encounter something that overwhelms our understanding: God incarnate – the second Person of the Holy Trinity – comes to us as bread and wine. So great is the glory of Christ in the Eucharist, so utterly beyond us, that we are pulled into the mystery. The altar is our Mount Tabor, where we see His glory, not with the eyes of flesh, but with the eyes of faith. Over the altar the Father’s voice mystically resounds, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.” We who enter into this mystery by receiving the Body of Christ in Holy Communion are enveloped by the cloud of the Holy Spirit. At Mass, we enter in to the mystery of God’s glory. He gazes on us, and we gaze on Him, and we become what we contemplate.
Christian Renaissance Movement 
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