Unto These Moments

Photo Credit: Ryan Roth-Klinck

By Andrea Lingle

Do you believe in Moments? Times when all the tumblers of life line up, and you feel the snick of the Divine pouring through the fabric of what was a normal day. Sometimes Moments are expected: births, vows, a finish line, but other times they are unexpected. When I am enveloped in a Moment, I can feel my soul say with Peter’s “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” (Luke 9:33) A Transfigured Moment leaves us longing to wrap up in it and tarry. But after the close quotation mark, Luke’s gospel reads: not knowing what he said. (Luke 9:33) Not knowing what he said! Peter would not have said such a thing if he had known what he was saying.

Why would you need to be crazy to want to inhabit the Moments? 

If Peter had known what he was saying he would never have suggested that . . . what? There is the question that beckons to us from the Return. We have been contemplating Pilgrimage over the last few weeks. It is a simple process which meets us along the ways and means of life. We have pondered the significance of preparation, the boldness of departing, the mystery of arrival, and, now, we really must Return. Peter’s impulse catches me deep in the guts. Let’s hang onto the Moment. Don’t let it go. Freeze it! Let us take the transcendent flow of mystery we have stumbled upon and crystalize it into amber. But like childhood or seeds or the smell of fresh bread, some things must be cherished and relinquished. 

What was Peter’s gaffe?

Peter mistook the Moment for the man. Even Jesus and Moses and Elijah, a dynamic trio to be sure, did not embody the Divine entirely. If Moments reveal something about the Divine, then they must always be a finger pointing. They are never the whole. Jesus knew that even as the Son of God, he did not form the whole shape of the Ineffable. The Divine is beyond the scope of form. Now, put your matches down. This does not make me a heretic. I am not questioning Jesus’s divinity, I am echoing Jesus’s own words: the Incarnation must be inhabited by the Spirit. (Acts 1, John 16:7). The Incarnation does not capture the whole. No Moment can, no One can, no Place can. That is the mystery of Trinity and pilgrimage.

The stuff of pilgrimage, the numinal fizz, is to be experienced with one eye toward home. To build a dam and swim around in the Moment would be to be content with the form of the Moment without the life. It would become a relic. Moments must be lived into and through. The journey of a thousand or ten slow steps asks: in light of all this, how shall we live?