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EPISCOPAL
DIOCESE OF PENNSYLVANIA
240 South Fourth Street · Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19106
(215) 627-6434, ext 112 · Fax: (215) 627-7550 · www.diopa.org
August 6, 2007
The Transfiguration of Our Lord
Dear Sisters and Brothers:
On this feast I am thinking of a story that circulated in the 1960’s about Arthur Michael
Ramsey, the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury. At the conclusion of a tedious, dreary,
day-long church meeting in the Synod House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in
New York City, His Grace, wearing a cassock, walked out the door and, seeing the
flowers and trees in the garden in the Cathedral Close, and the south wall of that
magnificent edifice bathed in the light of the setting summer sun, bound down the steps
with his arms raised on high as, lost in wonder, love, and praise, and without a hint of
embarrassment, hesitancy, or self-consciousness, he burst out loud with the words of the
Te Deum Laudamus:
“We praise thee, O God; we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship thee: the Father everlasting …”
The evangelists Mark and Matthew tell us that the transfiguration occurred on “the sixth
day.” But Luke, whose gospel we now read on Sundays, puts it on “the eighth day” – the
day beyond the seven days of the week, beyond the created order, a jubilee day, a
transfigured day. Only Luke, moreover, tells us that Moses and Elijah “appeared in
glory,” and that Peter and James and John saw their “glory” and that of Jesus. Only Luke
argues that they saw his transfigured beauty while (because?) they were “praying.”
May we, as freely as Michael Arthur Ramsey, and Peter and James and John, by every
means, and especially through our prayer, have the eyes of our hearts enlightened to see
beyond the horizons that normally limit our sight, the eighth-day glory, the transfigured
beauty, and presence of God wherever we look.
Open Forum on the Theology Committee’s Study September 5: I need your input! In
order for me to share at the mid-Sept