Sunday Reflection with Canon Robin Gibbons - 6 August 2023

Aug 5th, 2023

Dom Godefroy Raguenet

Transfiguration of the Lord

I am writing this in France, in my family area of the Jura, a place I know so well and from whose people and culture a lot of my religious faith has come.

We heard yesterday (4 August) of the tragic death of the young Father Abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of Notre Dame de Acey, which is very near to us. Dom Godefroy Raguenet, accidentally fell whilst on a walk in the mountains near the Abbey of Hauterive in Switzerland. Reflecting on his death and of a life suddenly cut short, I am reminded that in our monastic tradition death is not seen as the tragedy that many would have it. St Benedict tells us to keep death before our eyes each day, but also to see it as that final door of transfiguration which opens to the love beyond all love.

That thought brings me to this feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord Jesus on the mountain. I reflected long on the death of Fr Godefroy last night, not morbidly or negatively, but as a mystery that challenges me as it does each one of us, to turn the values and vision we have of ourselves and our life now, upside down and start to look at it from the angle of Christ. There is a local saying about death which puts it this way, " Dieu a besoin d'eux maintentant', 'God has need of them now!'. That of course is what we believe, but too often forget is the ending of our Christian journey. Yes, God has need of us in the here and now, but there is also that relationship beyond anything we have experienced, which is our destiny, not alone but caught up in relationship with the Holy One together, with all the blessed.

I made the connection between Fr Godefroy meeting Christ face to face in his mortal accident on the mountain, and that moment of death where he, we pray and hope, will be transfigured forever in Christ, united with us and those gone before him in the source and ground of our being, the Love that is God.

This is not morbid, it is about the greater mystery, the side of life that we hide from, the deeper call to 'let go and let God!'. The images of the Transfiguration are not simply part of a beautiful tale, it is one of those attested events in Scripture.

For we find in the second letter of Peter a statement about its veracity: 'We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain'. That captures my emotional attention, I hope it does yours, 'we were with him', and what seems to have been seen and experienced by the three disciples was something beyond the ordinary, an entrance into a greater mystery.

There is a lesson here, what one can call an ecstatic dimension of religious faith, what T S Eliot in his poem 'Little Gidding' describes in this way :

"With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started."

Here is the Transfiguration, a scriptural glimpse of what we will be one day with Christ, a point of encounter for ever, where we too are transformed, transfigured, touched by the glory of holiness, the enveloping of our whole being in the reality of God; that wonderful moment, when more as lovers than children we gaze into the brightness of God face to face, and then we SHALL truly know!

These moments occur in our here and now, but we need direction and help to understand them for what they are, a touch of the glory of God. This is the realm of experience, of deep feeling that we can trust, of being taken out of ourselves. These are the moments when we too are on the mountain, when the mist and cloud of our own complex little lives is suddenly lifted and we perceive a deeper reality, without totally knowing what has happened or what it is all about.

Again I use T S Eliot, who uses Julian of Norwich's consoling phrase, to grasp at what Peter tried to comprehend, that Christ is a reality of us and God together, that the Lord we serve, seek, love is more than anything to us, as we are to him, that the transfiguration is our vocation and our certain end;

"See, now they vanish, The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. Sin is Behovely, but All shall be well, and All manner of thing shall be well."

So I end as I began, trying to make sense of the day but looking at it through the lens of eternity in Christ found in the image of the Transfiguration. Here we are too, on our mountain, covered by a cloud of unknowing that lifts to reveal a dart of love reminding, calling us onwards to know and love Christ found amongst us in so many ways. Though I did not meet Dom Godefroy, his death has somehow opened up for me a new insight to the feast, a different horizon in my faith than yesterday, a bit of transfigured light and hope which I wanted to share with you all. I pray he finds that the vision of glory he sought is now his, and that resting in peace he becomes a friend in the Kingdom. May his transfiguration help us too.

Can I leave you with his own words of wisdom, which speaks to the faith-seeker in us all, and perhaps calls us to the horizon of the Transfiguration:

"With the shocks of the global health, ecological, economic and political crisis, our society is sick of not having an horizon. Monastic life, by its simple presence, opens a breach towards an Other, who is a promise, opens possibilities towards a horizon of meaning. This is the experience of those who come to the monastery."

(Dom Godefroy at: https://international.la-croix.com/news/religion/the-former-marine-commando-whos-now-a-trappist-abbot/14317)

Lectio

2 Peter 1:16-21

New International Version

For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. He received honour and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased." We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain.

We also have the prophetic message as something completely reliable, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Transfiguration

Poem by Fr Robert Gibbons

In Memory of Dom Godefroy

We are a people of mountain and valley,

Some remain on high

But need to come down to the valley

To live amongst the animals and people

To share in the life of daily living,

a horizon of the immediate.

Yet that is not always enough,

For those who follow Jesus

The climb up the mountain