A Luminous Darkness
“A cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud.”
Contemporary Canadian Catholic artist and author Michael O’Brien brings an attractive neo-Byzantine style to his visual art. Translating a concept into stark simplicity of color and shape, geometry and symbolism that this style demands means it is in large portion transfigured already.
And here, treating a Gospel moment that is depicted with some frequency, O’Brien’s treatment is fairly traditional. There is Jesus, the luminous figure at the center, with Moses and Elijah flanking him, floating above the earth. Beneath, Peter and James and John lie smitten and terrified, undone by the strange and terrible sight; tumbling, as though knocked clean off of the Mountain of Transfiguration.
But O’Brien takes things a step further, giving his own twist to the standard idiom. He has inverted the luminosity of the moment: rather than depicting Christ as immersed and awash in supernal light, he has depicted practically everything else as submerged in darkness. Creation is but the faintest and most distant of gloamings beneath the brightness of Christ and those who bear his image. Within the cloud, we see nothing, only hear that booming Voice: “This is my beloved Son, listen to him!”
If I say, 'Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,' even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.
— Psalm 139:11-12
Last Sunday of Epiphany \ Transfiguration Sunday
Texts for this Week
Prayer
O God, who before the passion of your only-begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain: Grant that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
This place …
Locus Iste is the Latin gradual for the anniversary of the dedication of a church. An ancient anthem of but a few awestruck words, it translates roughly to This place was made by God, a priceless sacrament, without reproach.
The words are meant to harken to Jacob’s dream of the ladder (Genesis 28:16), and Moses’s encounter at the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:5). We might think also of the mountain where Elijah met the voice (1Ki 19)and that peak where Christ was transfigured (Mark 9, inter alia). But Christ’s appearance presents a special case, and a special case that demands the rethinking of every case. For when Peter is moved to honor the place and the moment, we hear him rebuked for … well … missing the point.
How can these things be, that at once a place be so thin as to be almost transparent to the effulgence of that eternal glory, and yet we are summoned beyond it! These are deep mysteries, and there are no answers. But there is the Presence of Christ among us in the midst of the questions.
