Blog Posts
I don’t know if anyone else in the Axia universe spends any time watching British gardening shows. If you do, you’ll understand how I got inspired to build a small labyrinth of raised beds in our backyard. We hadn’t budgeted for anything of the sort, so we spent most of the late winter and early spring scavenging the wood from far and wide, laying it out, cutting, fitting, and fastening all the pieces into place. Then I spent months filling them with soil! This year a relative offered me a dilapidated greenhouse. We traveled several hours to take it apart, load it into our long-suffering car, haul it home, and reconstruct it. Both projects have been a lot of work with many rewards. I’ve made several pounds of pickles, for one thing.
The Transfiguration is one of those beautiful feasts that can hold a strong personal message for many of us. Here’s a reflection from another of our bloggers, Asha Mathai, on what it meant to her as she reflected on it this year.
Be transformed into something more beautiful or elevated! How many times have I blamed my misdeeds on my humanity? “I’m only human.” I made my humanity an excuse as a reason to explain why I don’t do what God is asking me to do. But the Feast of the Transfiguration, which we celebrated on August 6, helped me see how Jesus shows me how to rise above that.
I went back to look at the Transfiguration in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Orthodox Christians are typically shocked when I tell them that my favorite feast is the Transfiguration of Christ. Most assume that Pascha should be my ultimate religious holiday. Certainly, the Resurrection of Christ is the feast of feasts, but in my broken humanness, I find that I connect more to the story of Transfiguration and the many meanings it holds for my daily life. The humanness of Peter, James, and John and their eagerness to find ways to connect with the sensorially overwhelming message of their beloved teacher in this transtemporal moment of encounter, call to me as someone who is perpetually seeking and hiding from the face of God.
Last week, a miracle happened.
It was Sunday Liturgy.
I had quickly cut several flowers from my garden, secured them in my hair, and rushed to church. I venerated the icons and laid the flowers around them. As I passed by the large cross with Christ, I noticed a cobweb. With my scarf, I gently removed the cobwebs from the feet of Jesus. Suddenly, a stranger in the congregation started weeping.
After church, I asked her what happened. She said that when I was wiping the feet of the cardboard Jesus the real Jesus had appeared to her.
Then I started weeping that “out of the mouth of babes Thou hast ordained praise.” (Psalm 8)
"Who touched me?” Jesus said. He was walking through the city and crowds of people were following him eager to see this man, this healer and teacher who calms the sea and drives out demons.
Luke tells us the people were expecting him. His friends, the disciples, denied that he had been touched: they have no clue. Peter responds, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.”
But Jesus says, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.”
When I was Episcopalian and a member of the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine, I became a member of the healing ministry. We learned to be still, to hold our hands up to the head of the person before us, and feel the energy. We asked their name and what brought them to us. Then we laid our hands and said, “(Calling their name), I lay my hands upon you in the Name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, beseeching him to uphold you and fill you with his grace, that you may know the healing power of his love. Amen.”
Whenever I’m given a choice about reading one of the fifteen Old Testament passages during the Holy Saturday service, I always say, I’d really like to read #12! Is there any chance I could be assigned #12?
In the Eastern churches, that reading recounts the story of the Prophet Elisha and the wealthy woman who offers him hospitality, first giving him some food as he passed by and then building a guest room for him. (You can find it at 2 Kings 4: 8-37.)