The most important event of one's inner life is portrayed.... Every youth blunders his way into the Grail castle sometime around age fifteen or sixteen and has a vision that shapes much of the rest of his life....
Most men can remember a magic half hour sometime in their youth when the whole world glowed and showed a beauty not easily described. Perhaps it is a sunrise, a glorious moment on the playing field, a solitary time during a hike when one turns a corner and the whole splendor of the inner world opens for one. No youth can cope with this opening of the heavens for him and most set it aside but do not forget it. Others find it so disturbing that they dismiss it and play as if it had never happened.
Right there, I stopped reading. I laid down the book and stared off into a memory I'd completely forgotten for forty years!
One morning in my teenaged years I woke up with the rising of the sun. Everyone else in the house was asleep. I silently got dressed and went outside to see what I would see. Our "house" was a brick apartment building, with a wide stretch of concrete from doorsill to curbside, on the busiest street in our part of Newark, NJ.
But next-door were two huge lots that might as well have been in a ritzy suburb. On each lot a grand old mansion sat at the back of an expansive lawn. I sat by the driveway of the nearer estate, taking in the early morning scene.
The lawns seemed a huge green park... Birds chirped and twittered like nature's chancel choir... Did I watch a wiggly worm, a pretty little ladybug, a busy line of ants going about their work with a joy akin to Snow White's dwarves?
Whatever, that half an hour or so was a Transfiguration moment without the shining Christ. I was beholding the hidden glory of my mundane little corner of the world, as if the Holy City had descended on a cloud accompanied by the Robert Shaw Chorale's rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus.
I finally stood up, went back inside, got in bed, and took a little nap. When time to get back up arrived, I kept my secret to myself and went about the day as if none of it had ever happened. And then I forgot about it until well into my second or third midlife crisis.
How fortunate we are that Peter, James, and John absolutely refused to forget their Transfiguration moment, complete with a shining Christ at the center of it all.
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