February 16

It was a gray, rainy day here.  And yet, I managed to get out and get a little walk in with the dog.  Good to get fresh air after a day of sitting in front of a computer screen.  We timed it perfectly to meet Justin just as he was leaving his office and had a fun family walk home (including a stop at Gibson's, the local bakery/candy store to pick up paczkis for Polish paczki day).  When we got home, I sat down in the chair to chat with my sister on the phone and the dog climbed up on my lap and insisted on a belly rub.  It was pretty hilarious and made us both (Justin and me, not Tenney and me) laugh a lot.  That dog is spoiled, but, boy, does she know how to make us feel loved.  She greeted Justin with excited yips and three-quarter turns in the air when we met him near his office.  Unconditional love.

I just have to share this picture because I think it is absolutely gorgeous.  Sunday is Transfiguration Day and this is the Transfiguration image from Mark 9:2-9 in the St. John's Bible.  Isn't it amazing?

I love this entry on "Transfiguration" in Frederick Buechner's Beyond Words:

"His face shone like the sun," Matthew says, "and his garments became white as light."  Moses and Elijah were talking to him.  There was a bright cloud overshadowing him and out of it a voice saying, "This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him."  The three disciples who witnessed the scene "fell on their faces, and were filled with awe" (Matthew 17:1-6).


It is as strange a scene as there is in the Gospels.  Even without the voice from the cloud to explain it, they had no doubt what they were witnessing.  It was Jesus of Nazareth all right, the man they'd tramped many miles with, whose mother and brothers they knew, the one they'd seen hungry, tired, and footsore as the rest of them.  But it was also the Messiah, the Christ, in his glory.  It was the holiness of the man shining through his humanness, his face so afire with it they were almost blinded.


Even with us something like that happens once in a while.  The face of a man walking with his child in the park, of a woman baking bread, of sometimes even the unlikeliest person listening to a concert, say, or standing barefoot in the sand watching the waves roll in, or just having a beer at a Saturday baseball game in July.  Every once and so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive transfigures the human face that it's almost beyond bearing.




It is those moments that I treasure.  Those moments when the image of God becomes so clear right there in front of me.  I watch for them.  I wait for them.  I'm doing my best to notice them.