How Things Really Are

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration of Jesus—our remembrance of the time when, as poet Malcolm Guite says in his poem, Transfiguration:

The Love that dances at the heart of things
Shone out upon us from a human face

It is also the day we remember the bombing at Hiroshima in 1945, when the violent destruction of a nuclear bomb was first unleashed as a weapon of war. Yet Guite reminds us that the light of Christ will overcome the darkness that can inhabit our world as he concludes his poem with these lines:

Nor can this blackened sky, this darkened scar
Eclipse that glimpse of how things really are

When we are worn down from the darknesses of our age—the COVID pandemic, the epidemic of mass shootings and opioid addiction, the scourge of racism and sexism—it is difficult to trust that Love dances at the heart of things. Yet we do receive glimpses of how things really are if we expect to see them, if we recognize Love dancing in the patience of those who care for elderly persons, in the open hearts of families who adopt children with disabilities, in the tenderness of gardeners who nurture their plants. We get to choose whether we will succumb to the dark impulses that are within us and surround us or whether we will seek out the light that is at the heart of all things and reflect it.

It is good that we are here. Let there be light.