The next time you are walking down Walnut Street in the 1600 block, on the north side of the street, have a look inside the Apple store. It’s especially effective at nighttime. If you were a time traveling visitor from the nineteenth century and didn’t know what was really going on in that store, you might draw your own conclusion from the scene before you: people hunched before rectangular pieces of metal, faces lit up, and eyes fixated on some thing or person or vision, as if in a trance. You might think they were having a mystical or religious experience.
The posture of those who had flocked to that place, their faces seemingly transfigured by a mysterious, if artificial light, and the unflinching devotion of their gaze, all might lead an objective, anachronistic observer, to surmise that the Apple store was some place of transcendent experience, perhaps even a sacred gathering place.
That is hardly the case, as we know. While I own a Mac, I’d much rather be outside the frenzy of the Apple store than in it. I’m fine with my iPhone 6, thank you very much. But it’s hard to escape the reality of the way in which time can stand still when we’re sitting before the computer screen. It’s hard to deny the power that technology has over our lives.
We might end up with a headache after several hours of screen-gazing, but we do it anyway. You start by reading a Wikipedia article on the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and an hour later you are reading about the surprising regeneration capacity of axolotls.
The entrancing capacity of computer screens or iPhone screens is driven by some kind of insatiable hunger. It could be a hunger for knowledge. Or it could be a hunger to purchase that much-needed piece of furniture for your home office. Or it’s that hunger to check up on all your Facebook friends. Whatever it is, there’s an inner need that must be met, and we often might not know where it comes from. Trying to satisfy this need doesn’t even require communicating with other people. It’s worked out between you and the radiant light of the computer screen, shining on your face, and numbing your sensory perception.
It almost seems blasphemous to juxtapose an image of the glowing faces of hungry consumers in an Apple store with the glowing faces of Peter, James, and John on a mountaintop, as they basked in the light of the transfigured Christ. But if we indulge ourselves for just a minute and do compare these two scenes, maybe this uneasy juxtaposition will be revelatory for us, if not disturbing. Is the Apple store some kind of metaphor for modern, secular worship, a quest for pseudo-sacred meaning in a vacant age?
Think now, for a minute, about that scene on the mountaintop with Jesus in all his transfigured glory. The disciples’ faces would surely have been aglow, too, reflecting the brilliant light radiating from Jesus’s face. There would also have been the ambient light from the cloud that overshadowed them.
At first, the sudden appearance of bright light must have caused Peter, James, and John to blink or avert their gaze, but then surely they were curious and entranced by the vision before them. I picture them with eyes riveted, as if on a computer screen, but instead on the vision of Christ’s future glory in all its transcendence, mystery, and awe. And then with the unfathomable voice from the cloud, they were overcome with fear and fell to the ground on their faces. This gesture was not just a cowering in fear. It was a response of reverential worship. They could do nothing except fall to the ground in holy fear and adoration.
Now, recall the single-minded power in our own experiences, whether sacred or profane, when we are so overcome with emotion, interest, or yearning. We find ourselves unable to move; we are lifted out of ourselves. We are so caught up in the moment that we want to do nothing other than stay right where we are. We want to hit Command + S on our computers and save the moment in time. We don’t want to leave. We yearn to revel in the glory of what we are experiencing and stay there forever.
It’s no secret that people all around us are seeking such encounters. There is astounding loneliness in the modern world, fed by all kinds of things. And as if to counteract this vast emptiness, people are hungry, very hungry. They have voracious appetites that need to be fed, and people are seeking all kinds of ways to feed those appetites.
They are not just bowing down at the altars of technology in the Apple stores or Verizon stores across the world. They are constructing altars of devotion on mountains and hills all over the place: in gyms, in community centers, in the marketplace, in dog parks, in concert halls, in stadiums, in movie theaters, in book clubs. These are not necessarily idols, but they are places that have become, in some sense, sacred mountaintops in a moment in time when mountaintops of meaning are less obviously churches and seem to have very little to do with God. These alternative mountaintops are places where people flock, with great devotion, to fill the gaping holes of emptiness in their lives.
Observing people in such environments, you can actually see the glow on their faces, as if they have been transfigured. They are the red-hued faces on the treadmill, illuminated by the endorphins coursing through their veins. They are the sparkling faces of two dog owners in rapt conversation while their dogs frolic in the park. They are the radiant faces of people who have landed a great purchase in a clothing store.
In other more sinister forms, people’s faces are changed by the pills they have swallowed or the drugs they have ingested. The camps of people craving opioids in this very city are tragic evidence of a desire to escape the ubiquity of contemporary hollowness.
And so we must ask ourselves how we have gotten to this point, to such a desperate seeking of meaning in life. Perhaps the more central question is less about why loneliness and emptiness exist and more about why God is often not the ultimate source of meaning or why God is frequently replaced by other loci of meaning.
And so, you might ask, what is so wrong about finding meaning in such places? If people are finding community and fulfillment there, and if they are being personally transformed, what’s the harm? One can be enriched by the gym and by worshiping God. These places of personal enrichment are often good, and they need not compete with God.
But there is still a distinct difference between a mountaintop experience of Christ’s glory and other experiences that strive to provide significance for people’s lives and which seem to be gaining greater and greater devotion. The computer screen constantly lures us back to prostrate ourselves before it, because there’s always more information to gain. There’s always another email to answer. There’s always the latest app to download.
Likewise, the power of the gym is enticing. Can one ever be too fit? The ritual of sports practice, even on Sundays, gives structure to a life in the midst of chaos. And so all these places that provide a certain degree of personal fulfillment or happiness can also provide a certain degree of isolation from the surrounding world. They can become escapist adventures that offer respite from a chaotic and vapid environment.
And the faces of the worshipers who leave these pseudo-mountaintop experiences become dull after leaving their sacred valhallas, because a return to the outside world is a return to the emptiness and loneliness that is always still there, that indeed has been there from the beginning of time. The glow from the computer screen doesn’t stay on your faces once you leave the Apple store.
But a true mountaintop encounter with the living Christ, whose unique glory shines on our faces, does not just satisfy empty longings. It is a true metamorphosis of our souls. As the face of Christ was transfigured before the eyes of his rapt disciples, and as his unearthly glow reflected off their faces, they were changed. They fell to the ground as they were swept up in a moment of holy reverence.
And then, Jesus touched them. And in this profound gesture, Jesus revealed to future ages why a sacred encounter with him surpasses any other mountaintop experience that we try our best to engineer. With his holy touch, Jesus called the disciples back to themselves, healed them of their fear, and sent them back down the mountain with faces shining from their experience.
Surely the disciples also had a yearning for change in their own lives when they followed Jesus up the mountain, even though they did not know what they would experience there. But Jesus, with his powerful touch, made it clear that they could not stay on that mountain forever. Indeed, the mountain was not itself the end goal but a means of real transformation, not just for themselves but for the whole world. The disciples need to go back down and become a part of human suffering, emptiness, loneliness, and dying, and there they were called to radiate light into a hurting world.
In his touch, Jesus shows us, too, that what God gives us in our sacred experiences with him outweighs anything that other pseudo-sacred experiences can offer. While manufactured hill altars constantly attract our attention and gaze, they never provide us with Jesus’s healing touch that calls us back to reality and sends us down the mountain. They only demand more and more devotion. They are hungry gods that can never be glorified enough, and they never feed us enough. And the shining light that glows on our faces fades away as soon as we leave the mountaintop.
But God’s glory shines on us and in us, illumines our hearts, and sends us among the desperate and hurting, to radiate that light into the world around us. If God came down from his throne of glory to be a part of such a world, then we must be there, too.
When I walk by the Apple store or the numerous gyms with their avid spin cyclists, I admit that I wish more of those people were bowing down with holy fear in the temples of God. Maybe some of them are, I don’t know. But I long for every person I meet to have a true experience with the living God, rather than seeking what only God can provide in other places.
But you are here, and I’m preaching to the choir. Maybe what’s important is our ability to show our own transformed selves, radiating with the glow of Christ’s glory, in a world that needs to see more faces shining with the truth of God.
Only the touch of Christ can heal us of our fear of loneliness and of the emptiness in our world. Only his touch can heal the divisions and anger within humanity. Only his touch can cause our own hearts to be transformed and our faces to sparkle with the hope that God is always making things new.
And so at the end of this Mass, we will need to leave this sacred mountaintop, where we receive Christ’s glory in Bread and Wine. And we will need to wake from our blissful reverie with Christ’s holy touch, telling us to go. Go out those doors and let his glory shine, and do not fear. Because as glorious as it is, we can’t stay on this mountain forever, and God doesn’t want us to stay here either.
Preached by Father Kyle Babin
23 February 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia