The River of Ecstacy
The Monday Mystery Part Nine: The Transfiguration
“And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.” (Matthew 17:2)
Welcome to the ninth entry of The Monday Mystery. Each week I will write a reflection on a mystery (i.e. an episode in the life of Jesus or Mary) from the Rosary. My hope for this series is to provide fuel and inspiration for your own meditations. When you finish reading the reflection, I encourage you to do a ‘test run’ of the mystery by praying a decade of the Rosary (i.e. one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and one Glory Be) while meditating on the mystery.
Countless glossy magazines, flashy influencer posts, and trendy phone apps advertise meditation and prayer as ways to reduce stress, to unwind, and to clear your mind. To be sure, prayer can and does all of that and more. But to me, it seems like inspirational profiles of prayer can all too easily make it seem like a trip to the spa. A more accurate image would be back-country camping.
Many find the idea of camping repulsive. Why would someone voluntarily pay money and use up their precious few vacation days to experience the psychological torture of being eaten alive by bugs, the smothering misery of sweltering heat, the biting bitter chill of soaked clothes and frigid nights, and the mind numbing boredom of having nothing to do and nowhere to go? To top it all off, you could die. The dozens of ways your next camping trip could be your last include exposure, blood loss, snake bites, rabies, unannounced adjustments to the grizzly bear lunch hour, and many more.
If you’ve never been camping, and no answers jump out to you, I humbly suggest that the fact that people so passionately love it anyways puts it in the ‘don’t knock it till you’ve tried it’ category. Whatever it is that camping offers, it’s good enough that people are willing to put up with sometimes extreme discomfort and inconvenience to get it. But here’s the rub: what ‘it’ is is hard to describe, and it’s even more difficult to replicate on command.
You can’t bottle the blissful stillness and peace you suddenly feel when you mind finally settles on day three, and you feel like you could listen to the birds and trickling river for the rest of the day. The camaraderie you feel after slaving over a meal that could have taken a tenth of the work if you microwaved it isn’t like a room you can go visit. It’s more like the rainbow that you stumble upon if you’re lucky.
Like camping, prayer has its challenges - some of them beyond anything you might have expected from the gift shop portraits of parents teaching their kids to pray. If you enter seriously into prayer, you are taking the greatest journey a human being can go on. But you should be prepared to enter into deep, and sometimes dark and dangerous waters. More commonly, you’re signing up for a lot of boring waters where the nostalgia from fishing with your grandpa has worn off and you haven’t caught anything for three hours.
Why can prayer be so boring and unpleasant? St. Ignatius of Loyola teaches that God allows us to go through desolation in our spiritual life for three reasons. The first reason God permits desolation is to discipline us when we find ourselves regressing in the spiritual life. As a loving father, God will not provide positive reinforcement to bad behavior.
The second reason is to purify our desires. In any relationship, one must ask: do I love this person, or do I merely love the way I feel when I’m around them? Sooner or later, the feelings will go away. And sooner or later, the other person will hurt you or bore you. If the relationship is only based on feelings, it won’t survive. By allowing us to go through times without consolation, God is teaching us how to truly love him, and to truly love others.
The third reason is to teach us that it is not in our power to produce consolations. God is not a vending machine. But if we felt good every time we prayed, we’d unavoidably become convinced that the experiences we have in prayer are under our control. This would defeat the purpose of prayer, which is not to feel good, but to be in relationship with God. Prayer is not a meditation method or a relaxation technique. Prayer is our engagement with God. The sooner we realize that this happens on his terms and not ours, the better.
Having said all of this, I think it’s important to remember that according to St. Ignatius of Loyola, desolation in prayer is not a good thing. Although God will permit our prayer to become dry and boring, this is not how it’s supposed to be, and it’s not how it will be in heaven. This is the grain of truth of perfectionism: things aren’t supposed to be less than ideal, even though we have to learn how to cope with them often being so.
I recently had a good conversation with a mentor about perfectionism. I was frustrated by creative plateaus I was experiencing in my violin playing and photography. Talking through my experience helped uncover the perfectionism behind this frustration. I was comparing the current stage of my journey to a stage where I felt like I was creatively peaking. There were a few sessions where it seemed like everything I tried somehow kept making my photos even more beautiful and personally meaningful. I felt like I could just keep uncovering new layers of depth forever. In this time of creative desolation, I feel I now have to work much harder for results that are much less satisfying.
When my mentor gently chided me, reminding me that life is a journey and not a destination, I couldn’t help but wonder, “isn’t what I was experiencing the destination? What other purpose is there to art than the ecstasy and connection we feel when we make and share it?”
In todays mystery, I suspect that Peter faced a similar conundrum. Jesus is gloriously transfigured before his eyes, and Moses and Elijah appear alongside him. No doubt enraptured by the dazzling heavenly apparition, Peter exclaims, “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” Like many New Testament incidents which people have historically judged harshly, Peter deserves a little more credit here than people give him. The event was absolutely soaked in Old Testament symbolism. Peter’s suggestion to build tents shows an astute consciousness of the Hebrew scriptures. But it also shows an incomplete spiritual sense. He was tasting heaven, but he forgot that he was still on Earth.
Jesus’ decision not to hold on to this mountaintop experience was not an expression of killjoy puritanism. His resolute determination to continue on to face his crucifixion was not an act of grim stoicism. He was teaching his disciples and us the proper approach to the ecstasy and pleasure we crave. Like the mana which fed the Israelites in the desert, the tastes of heaven we feel in this life cannot be bottled and stored up for later. They are meant to encourage and sustain us, and ultimately to motivate us to pursue the giver of these good gifts.
For your test run today, reflect on how Peter was both right and wrong for wanting to build a tent on the mountain. Unlike stoicism, puritanism, and some currents of Eastern thought, Christianity teaches us that we are not supposed to ignore, suppress, or disengage from pleasure and ecstasy. Rather, we see it as a river. When this river stops flowing toward its destination, it becomes a stagnant, smelly bog. When it flows unobstructed to its end goal, it forms a clear and calming stream. May God bless you as you pray.