If you have a dog or live on a street with lots of dogs you might have noticed that things have been quiet lately.
My little dog has dug a hole at the foundation of our house and lies there all day long, stretched out with her belly up against the cool bricks. When she gets up to eat and drink she looks kind of weighed down, like a heavy blanket has settled on her back.
It is August. It is hot. The dog days of summer have arrived.
The sunlight is no longer a wispy warm caress, now it has weight, thickness, a heavy saddle blanket draped across everything, a hot bath washing across us.
I don’t know why, but I find the dog days strangely appealing. Make no mistake I am thankful for air conditioning, but I can’t help but feel like we are cheating somehow, that maybe that droopy old hound dog under the front steps might be on to something.
Glory has a weight to it, and there is no escaping the thickness of God that inundates the world.
Walking under the August sun, it is thick and heavy, hot syrup, boiling sticky sap dripping down from the sun.
Glory has weight.
His face changed and his clothes became dazzling white.
Jesus was transfigured, revealing him to be the chosen, the beloved, the Son to whom we are to listen.
Moses was transfigured. He had to cover his face to protect Israel from his radiance. Elijah, never died, he was caught up in a chariot of fire instead.
The glory of God does more than just shine upon us.
The glory of God does more than shine through us.
We actually are the glory of God.
And sometimes we catch a glimpse, sometimes we feel the weight of that glory, like the dog days of summer, it can’t be avoided, our air conditioning fails.
Peter, James and John caught a glimpse. Peter babbled. All three were terrified.
Unlike Moses they did not have to cover their faces when they came down the mountain, but I bet they looked weighted down.
And they didn’t tell a soul.
The thing that really separates Christianity from all other world religions, whether it is Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism is how we understand the interaction of Spirit and matter.
All the other world religions think the material world and the spiritual world are opposed to each other, at odds with other. Physical existence is a corruption and a hindrance to the spiritual life.
Our bodies are at best a mere piece of hardware to discard or at worst foul prison that we must escape.
Many Christians think like that, but their conversions are not complete.
Christians believe that the physical world is not a barrier to God. Rather we believe it reveals God glory. In the distinctness and uniqueness, in the beauty of and in distance between all people and things we see the distinctness, the uniqueness, the beauty, and the distance of God.
We are so different from everyone else, creation is not a hindrance opposed to God, rather it is in some way just like God, it draws us into God, and by being part of the created Universe we are part of God’s glory.
Creation is not a dirty thing to be denied and discarded.
Rather, what we believe is that creation is both transfigured and transfiguring.
Glory is not some feathery thing, glory has weight, God given created weight.
Our finitude is embraced by and contains the grace of the infinite.
We really should not speak of “another world”, we should rather say that the world is infinitely more than we can expect.
When the Gospel is fully alive in the Church what we preach is that that there is a promise of newness of life, that all creation is very good, that God became flesh, fully human, that God drank the chalice of our fallenness, our lostness, our violence, our self loathing, of our death, and God drank it all the way to the bottom.
We preach that God pursues us all the way into hell to set the prisoners free.
We preach that God rose physically from the dead.
That there is a resurrection of the flesh.
That ultimately the heavens and the earth will be restored and renewed, not cast aside.
The cardinal signs of the Gospel are not austere and angry conflicts but rather fellowship, feasting, bread and wine a sensual experience.
When the Gospel is fully alive we become less and less like each other, more and more different, and in that difference we see the beauty of the infinite God.
We love and respect our differences because they set us apart as unique, and in loving that which is not us, not like us, we find that we are loving the God who is not like us, the God who rejoices in making a likeness of himself that is distinct from himself and in that distinctiveness we see beauty and infinity and glory, a glory that is thicker than August Sunlight, a glory with weight.
It is a glory without violence, because violence is always an attempt to control or destroy that which is different and unlike us. The Gospel says that the distance between all things, that the difference in all things is sacred and ablaze with glory because in that distance we God’s rejoicing and overflowing love for that which is other.
The pagan world is a world of violence, where the other is always a threat. Our culture is a pagan culture, it is a “sibling society”, we are not allowed to be with others who are different, who don’t think the same, we are pushed and coerced into little tribal groups of the like minded and we close our eyes to the glory that rains down upon us thick and sweet.
We are taught to think we have to understand everything and everyone to be a part of them. When the truth is that poetry comes first, poetry comes before reason and understanding, and the poem is that the distance between us is beautiful, because God creates and wills and spills over with difference and otherness.
The vision of glory and beauty that we see in the Transfiguration of Jesus is the ultimate contradiction, challenge, cooption, and judgment upon the Pagan vision that we are caught up in.
We see that creation is part of the beauty and glory of God. That otherness is a delight. That flesh and bone can reveal and become God. That this vision can draw all things into communion with God just by the sheer beauty of and desire for who Jesus Christ is.
That there is more to the world than we can ever expect.
That these are the dog days of glory.