A renewed look
Letter to friends - Qiqajon di Bose n. 76 - Trasfiguration 2024
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"He was transfigured before them" (Mt 17:2). The good news that the feast of the Transfiguration offers us is in this event of light: the man Jesus changes his appearance in the presence of three of his disciples and the divine nature that dwells in him shines out in all its fullness before human beings created in the image and likeness of God. Thus it is the very gaze of the disciples that is transfigured, benefiting from a new light in which to contemplate the Son of Man. A new gaze - that of Peter, James and John on Tabor and that of each and every one of us when we raise it towards the transfigured Lord - that enables a different discernment of the realities we find at the foot of the mountain, in our daily pilgrimage towards the heavenly Jerusalem. A gaze renewed and made clairvoyant by frequenting the Law and the Prophets - present through Moses and Elijah - and by listening to the beloved Son, as the voice of the Father resounded on Tabor asks us to do.
If we also accept to listen "with trepidation to what the admonishing voice of God repeats to us every day" and open "our eyes to that divine light" (cf. Rule of Benedict, Prol 9), we realise that we are part of a Creation whose "ardent expectation is stretched out towards the revelation of the sons of God", a Creation "subjected to transience" in the hope of being "freed from the slavery of corruption to enter into the freedom of the glory of the sons of God", a Creation that all together "groans and suffers the pangs of childbirth until now" (cf. Rom 8:19-22). A disfigured Creation that awaits its own transfiguration.
Today this disfigurement has two very precise names, two tragic realities that unite human beings, animals, water, earth and sky: war and climate change. Two realities whose tragic intertwining we have been witnessing for some time now makes the effects of each even more deadly. Two realities constantly produced and nurtured by the behaviour of us human beings, who have instead received from the Creator of heaven and earth the task of being caretakers of our brothers and sisters in humanity and custodians of the co-creatures with which we move and exist.
War disfigures humanity, disfigures its face. Dead, wounded, maimed, refugees, torn families, disappearance of the three essential conditions for a life worthy of the name: a land, a home, a job. War destroys relationships, trust in the other, a shared view of the future: how many generations will it take before enemy peoples can still talk to each other, live alongside each other, cherish the common good together? What kind of human being is it that in one's fellow human being, in one's neighbour, cannot see anything other than the potential murderer of what he holds most dear? What ties can be woven with those who have broken the vital bonds woven with their own people? What future opens up for those who have lived for years only with the anguish of surviving until the next day?
But war also disfigures the earth, raping it of its natural resources and the human works that had cultivated and transformed it into a common home. War sows ordnance, pollutes water and groundwater, burns forests, destroys crops, annihilates domestic and wild animals. War tears up paths, destroys bridges and guts domestic hearths, razes schools and hospitals, obliterates squares, bell towers and minarets, disrupts markets, ovens and wells. How to return to enjoying the fruits of the earth and human labour? How to reconstruct common spaces that are born from sociality and nourish it? How to share again resources that have become rare or inaccessible?
In turn, climate change disfigures the face of our planet - the earth, the sky and the sea - with its animals: droughts and floods, aquifers sinking and drying up, oceans rising and warming, glaciers melting and winds whirling madly... Inhabitable and fertile lands, which nourished those who inhabited them as heirs and custodians of an ancestral heritage, become factories of sterile monocultures or warehouses for storing fattened cattle. How can we still listen to the voice of St Francis singing the earth as mother, the sun, wind and fire as brothers, the moon, clouds, water and even death as sisters? How do we keep alive the mission of Noah who saves and guarantees generativity to animals of all species?
But the climate, which no longer tolerates our violence and reacts according to its own laws, also disfigures the face of humanity: famines and pandemics, heat waves and once exceptional weather events multiply the number of deaths on a daily basis, adding to and combining with the victims of wars and injustice. Political exiles thus mingle with climatic migrants, while those who stubbornly try to remain in the land of their ancestors see their existence reduced to a strenuous and abject struggle for survival.
This bleak end-of-the-world picture may appear apocalyptic. In reality apocalyptic it is, etymologically: it is "revelatory". It reveals where our anthropocentric arrogance is leading us, it highlights where we have reached with our arrogant refusal to repudiate war and build peace, to respect creation and not abuse creatures, it reveals what we have done with our brothers and sisters in humanity, with human solidarity and our own freedom.
But the good news of the Transfiguration reminds us that - no matter how complex the situation may be and how beyond our possibilities the solutions may seem - it is enough to change our gaze, to take on the merciful eye of the Lord in order to move us to compassion, like the Samaritan on the road to Jericho, and to come to the aid of the victims, our neighbour: the 'nearest', the one to whom we draw near or the one who approaches us because far away he no longer finds the conditions to live with dignity with his loved ones. A gaze renewed by gazing upon the face of the Son of God made man makes us capable of renewing our commitment to care for others, our daily relationships, our behaviour, the common good, language itself, now often poisoned by lies and hatred. In this way we will be able to transfigure the world of which we are guests, reading the "signs of the times" - as Pope John XXIII urged us to do in his last, very timely encyclical "Pacem in terris" - aware that in the atomic age it is "alienum a ratione", "madness" to think of re-establishing justice through war. Yes, madness for this time of ours, which so closely resembles the time foreseen by Antony the Great in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century: "A time will come when men will go mad, and when they see one who is not mad, they will rush against him, saying, 'You are mad!' because of his dissimilarity from them".
The brothers and sisters of Bose
Bose, 11 July 2024,
Feast of St Benedict, monk
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