Transfigurations:
Mountaintop Moments and Valley Lives
Sunday, August 26, 2007, 11:00 a.m.
First Unitarian Church of San José
Worship Leaders: Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones and Rev. Geoff Rimositis
Worship Associates: Mary Martin and Transylvania Pilgrims

Call to Worship                                                                      Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones
Today we look at mountaintop experiences—those moments of such beauty or intensity, those moments of such a unique sense of aliveness that they change us forever. Today we ask, How in the world do these mountaintop moments relate to our “valley lives”—our everyday lives of smaller joys and larger sorrows, of schoolwork and housework and work-work? Today we go on a journey, on a pilgrimage, to the top of the mountain … and back again. Listen for the contrasts. Feel the transformations.
May this poem by Mary Oliver set us on our way. [1] It’s called “Climbing Pinnacle.”

It is only a small mountain
    as mountains go,
too stubby for any map.
    But still, in my boots,

I climbed and climbed
   until at last there was nothing
but the blue sky
   and a single final pasture

and a few not-very-tall trees—
   and from under these came running
a fawn on its tumbly legs,
   the sound of its wanting falling
from its pink, pursed mouth.
   But I knew the rule:

Don’t touch it, or the doe
   might never come back!
So what could I do? It almost
   reached me
before I slung myself into a tree.
   And there I was,

higher even than the mountain,
   perched for hours
while beauty held me tightly
   with the long lashes of its dark eyes
and the delicate, stamping hooves.
   Below me I could see and hear

the tiny people calling my name
   in the far-below fields—
even the great horse, Jack,
   was sniffing among the grasses.
But I didn’t move
   until the doe came back,

angry and snorting,
   and she and the fawn tiptoed away.
And so I was free.
   And there was nothing to do,
as there is never anything to do,
   after rapture,

but to swing down
   bough after bough—
to hurry down, field after field,
   through the pale twilight,
to be greeted by the people
   who loved me, far below.

Story for All Ages      Johnny Flies High,                                 Rev. Geoff Rimositis
                                    by Rev. Geoff
“Everyday it is just the same old thing. I get out of bed disappointed that my feet are still firmly on the ground. I take a little jump with my arms stretched out to the sky but nothing happens. I’m supposed to fly. You know, leap tall buildings with a single bound, do backstrokes on a cumulus cloud, and reduce my carbon emissions!
But nothing. Gravity just brings me down. Why do I keep dreaming about flying if I can’t fly? It’s not fair. I was born to be a superhero.”

“Johnny, today’s the day you mow the lawn,” Johnny’s mom reminded him.

“Mom, why don’t we let the grass grow really high, and then we can declare our backyard a nature preserve?”

“Tall grass is a fire hazard, and besides we need to see where the dog does his business. We don’t want to be tracking that in on the carpet, do we?”

Johnny, out of excuses, gets out the mower and untangles the cord, plugs it into the electrical socket, attaches the grass catcher, and then turns the mower on.

Up and down. Back and forth. Row after row Johnny pushes the mower. When the grass bag fills up, he has to stop, empty the bag, and then start again.

“Boring! What a waste of time! I could be working on getting to level 20 in Temple of Doom, vanquishing trolls, ogres, and assorted flying beasts. I could be solving Sudoku puzzles or even fine-tuning the theory of relativity. But here I am stuck mowing the lawn and getting grass stains on my pants.”

Johnny was feeling good and sorry for himself, imagining a million and one things that he would rather be doing. It was then that he began smelling smoke. He thought something was wrong with the lawn mower, so he shut it off and looked underneath where the blades go round and round. No, it wasn’t coming from the lawn mower.

It was then that he looked up and saw smoke coming from the roof of Mrs. Grogan’s house. Johnny mowed Mrs. Grogan’s lawn too and was often over at her house doing errands or enjoying a fresh-baked chocolate brownie. He knew that Mrs. Grogan lived by herself. Without giving it a second thought, Johnny ran across the street and banged on the door yelling, “Mrs. Grogan! Mrs. Grogan!”

Not hearing anything, Johnny tried the doorknob. The door was unlocked. He ran into the house going from room to room. “Mrs. Grogan! Mrs. Grogan!” Johnny finally found Mrs. Grogan asleep in her bed. He woke her up and helped her outside. Johnny couldn’t believe what he had just done. He never thought of himself being particularly brave. But here he was with his heart pumping so hard it felt like it was going to explode with excitement. It then hit him as he stood next to Mrs. Grogan watching the burning house. “Oh, my God, I went into a burning building and rescued someone. What was I thinking?”

Johnny felt as powerful as a superhero. He was flying high. He never knew that helping someone could feel so good. He wishes he could feel like this all the time.

The fire trucks soon arrived, and they were able to put out the fire. But it was Johnny’s quick thinking and generous action that had helped to save Mrs. Grogan’s life. Johnny got his picture in the newspaper. Everyone was calling him a hero. He even received a special medal from the mayor of the city.

After awhile all the hoopla died down and life got back to normal. And guess what? The lawn still needed mowing. Chores still needed to get done. But now Johnny didn’t mind mowing the lawn. Because even when he was doing the simplest chore, he had a new sense of what he could do. He even brought some of that quick thinking and generous action to the simplest everyday tasks. And when he did, he felt—just a little—the way he had felt the day he saved Mrs. Grogan. Even a young boy like himself can make a difference.

“I have a power within me to do good. And when I do it without worrying about what I am going to get out of it, everyday feels like my birthday.”

Johnny still wishes he could be free of gravity—but he also knows what it feels like when love helps you to fly.

Reading I        From Huston Smith’s Foreword                                          Nancy Coleman  
                              to The Art of Pilgrimage,     by Phil Cousineau

To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life. Nothing matters now but this adventure. Travelers jostle each other to board the train where they crowd together for a journey that may last several days. After that there is a stony road to climb on foot—a rough, wild path in a landscape where everything is new. The naked glitter of the sacred mountain stirs the imagination; the adventure of self-conquest has begun. Specifics may differ, but the substance is always the same….
            So target a distant place—your Mecca, your Jerusalem, your Mount Meru—and set out. You needn’t don a hairshirt, for obstacles enough will erupt. But by attending to them now—openness, attentiveness, and responsiveness are the essence of pilgrimage—you will be able to surmount them by yielding to them in the way that life always requires that we yield to it. And draw the resilience you will need from those who have preceded you, for pilgrims are a hardy breed. They trudge rough roads, put in long days, and live on breadcrusts. But hunger turns those crusts into gourmet fare, and pilgrims sleep well from their fatigue, even when their beds are hard ground and stones are their pillows. On clear nights the stars that steer them cover them with their canopy and token the eternal.

Reading II      Connections Are Made Slowly,            Alec Resch and Aaron Smith
                             by Marge Piercy     

Alec: Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

Aaron: You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.

Alec: More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.

Aaron: Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.

Alec: Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.

Aaron: Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.

Alec: Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Aaron: Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.

Alec: Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.

Aaron: Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside, but to us, interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Alec: Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen:

Aaron: Reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

Alec: This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,

Aaron: For every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

Sermon           Transfigurations: Mountaintop Moments and Valley Lives         
               Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones
There is a story about a mountaintop experience in the Christian Scriptures. And it has all the same life-changing intensity of the stories we’ve already heard—about Mary Oliver up in a tree, staring beauty in the face. About Johnny leaping into action and discovering that with love he really can fly. About pilgrims climbing their sacred mountain and, through their hardships, gaining a glimpse of the eternal…. So let us pile on top of these stories one more description of a peak experience. This one comes from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 9, verses 2-8:

2Six days later, Jesus took with him [the disciples] Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. 4And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. 5Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 6[Jesus] did not know what to say, for they were terrified, [blown away, amazed]. 7Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Beloved; listen to him!” 8Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

The “Transfiguration”—that’s what this story is called. Picture it:
Jesus picks out a few of his disciples and leads them on a pilgrimage up to the top of a high mountain. We can only imagine how rough the climb was for the disciples, how filled with expectation and with questions: where is he taking us? Why did he choose us?
Finally, finally, they arrive at the mountaintop. The disciples are exhausted, they are hot and sweaty … But then, in a flash, Jesus suddenly changes right before their eyes! His face—which before has always been just like any of their faces—his face is suddenly filled with light, and his clothes gleam whiter than any bleach could make them.
And just as suddenly two other incredibly famous people show up beside Jesus—now the disciples must really think they are hallucinating or maybe oxygen-deprived! Because there’s Moses, the great liberator, the one who led his people to freedom; and Elijah, the great prophet, the one who spoke truth to power and called everyone to act for justice. And Moses’ and Elijah’s faces are also shining, and their clothes are gleaming …
In fact, the disciples are so filled with awe and wonder that their faces are shining, too! They are filled with light, both with the light that is reflected off Jesus and Moses and Elijah, but also with a light that comes from within them. Can you imagine it?
And all of this is so amazing that they don’t want any of it to stop! They want to just set up some tents and camp right there for the rest of their lives….

Well, of course they do! We’ve all had these mountaintop experiences—maybe not exactly like the one in this metaphor-laden story, but we’ve all had peak experiences filled with wonder and awe. Think about it: haven’t there been times when you have been lifted out of your ordinary daily life by something—some intense experience of beauty, maybe … or maybe by something so elemental that we are lifted up out of our everyday thoughts and given a new perspective on life, like when we witness a baby being born or when we stand near as someone we love passes away peacefully? Or maybe we have had some momentary encounter with something or someone or someplace new that has touched us so deeply that it seems to wake us up, as though we had been sleeping all this time. And in these moments when we have felt intensely alive and awake, haven’t we seen people’s faces shining with that same light that the Bible passage describes? And maybe, just maybe, haven’t we felt a light shining out from within us, too, so that our heart sings with it?
And then, don’t we wish we could stay in that place, that state of mind and heart, forever?

This summer, this congregation sent off two sets of pilgrims to faraway places. One group went to South Africa—we will hear their stories later, when they’ve had more time to recover from jetlag. The other group, the one that Rev. Geoff and I traveled with, went to Transylvania, in Romania. We traveled to the homelands of Unitarianism, where the Unitarian faith burst forth in a blaze of reason and religious freedom some five hundred years ago and where our Unitarian brothers and sisters have courageously been keeping that faith alive ever since.
Like the disciples, like most pilgrims, we had a long, hot, exhausting journey. And like the disciples, like most pilgrims, when we finally arrived at our destination—the village of Szentmárton in the Homoród Valley, where our Partner Church resides—we almost immediately began to experience “transfigurations”: real changes in the world around us, and in the people whom we met, and in ourselves. There were moments, large and small, when everyone and everything around us seemed intense and focused, new, strange, alive, and filled with light.
Let me share just one of my mountaintop moments with you, and in a moment, Mary Mary will offer a few of hers.
Our congregant Crystal Lanier headed up the biggest project of our trip: to create a labyrinth in the churchyard just outside the 14th-century wall that surrounds the church itself. The idea was that we—the fourteen adults and fourteen youth who traveled from here to there—would work together with the villagers to create this physical connection between us—a shared spiritual path, if you will, laid out in stones and sand on their sacred ground in the same pattern that we have here in the center of our sanctuary.
Well, when we got there and saw the ground where the labyrinth was to be created, our hearts sank. It was a weedy, overgrown patch of earth that slanted upward from the outer wall to the inner wall of the churchyard, and right where the outermost rings of our labyrinth should be, there was a steep embankment. What’s more, there was this strange stone-and-cement object in the yard, kind of close to the bushes at the property’s edge—and Rev. Jozsef, the minister of our partner church, said that this thing was to be the center of our labyrinth. And we had just two days to clear and level and finish the whole thing before it was to be dedicated in a big ceremony on that Sunday! How could it possibly be done? But Jozsef said, “Don’t worry! We can do it—you will see!”
So Crystal took a deep breath, revised her plans, rallied the troops, and the next morning a hardy crew dug in, with rusty shovels and heavy pickaxes and gardening gloves. Did I mention that it was hot? Really, really hot. I worked for just an hour before I had to go write the sermon that I would be preaching on that Sunday. When I checked in with folks at midmorning, they were leaning on their shovels, or had thrown themselves on their backs across the church wall, dripping sweat and looking discouraged. In the churchyard, most of the weeds were gone, some of the trenches were begun where we would place river stones to mark the outlines of the labyrinth, and that stone-and-cement thing really was in the middle of the pattern. But … a major chunk of the steep embankment still remained, and there was a still steady rise from one side of the labyrinth to the other.
“We’re not going to be able to level it; it’s just not possible in the time we have,” Crystal said to Jozsef. “Is it okay with you if the labyrinth is on a slant?”
“No, no, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Jozsef said, which puzzled us. “Just keep going; let’s see what happens!” And so everyone picked up their shovels again, and I went back to Jozsef’s office to scratch out a few more paragraphs.
When I came out a few hours later, almost everyone had gone to lunch. I stopped by the churchyard—and suddenly, there it was: the labyrinth, cleared, level, a few stones marking where the completed paths would be. Crystal and Rob Strong had discovered that the shadow of the tower fell across that stone-and-cement thing in the center like a sundial; the corners of the tower and that center object lined up almost perfectly east and west. The labyrinth marked the quarters, honoring the earth and its cycles. From an uneven, unkempt, unloved patch of ground, the churchyard had been transfigured into a sacred space laid out in an ancient pattern. It was, quite literally, a spiritual path—and it was shining in the blazing midday sun. I wanted to stay there, gazing at it, forever.

But no matter what our mountaintop experience may be, we cannot pitch our tents up there on the mountain and stay in that light-filled place. Mary Oliver had to climb down out of the tree and hurry down to supper; Johnny had to go back and finish mowing the lawn. And all of us pilgrims, after our mountaintop moments, must return to our daily lives, return to the stresses and the hurts and the distractions that are part of being human. This is what it means to be a “valley people.” And perhaps that metaphor is particularly apt for us here in the Silicon Valley—in this stressful, distracting, beautiful Valley of Our Heart’s Delight.
            But do we have to leave the mountaintop behind altogether? What do we bring back with us? How have we been changed? Think back to your own mountaintop experiences—what did you bring back?
            As for me, I won’t be so easily stopped now by a steep hill that stands right where I hope to create a thing of beauty. It may take longer down here in the valley where there’s always more than one project to work on at a time, but I know now what we are capable of. Marge Piercy says that sometimes connections grow underground and we can’t always tell by looking what is happening. So here in the valley, I’m going to trust the slowness of growth in the dark, where everything is not blazing with light. “No, no, it’s okay, it’s okay,” I’m going to say, for example, when someone tells me that building the Beloved Community is just an idealistic dream. “Just keep going; let’s see what happens.”
And I’m not going to be so daunted by language barriers—real ones, like the one between Spanish and English, say, or figurative ones, like the ones between those of us who don’t like “spiritual” talk and those who do. On the mountaintop, I had conversations with people who were speaking Hungarian while I was speaking English—two completely unrelated languages—yet we understood each other. We connected, we began to be friends. So here in the valley, I invite us all to move more slowly and to be more courageous and to watch as well as listen, and to be ready for that moment when the light blazes forth in each other’s faces, and we know that we understand each other, and the seeds of friendship have been planted.
            Finally, when I lose my way here in the valley, and my heart feels dry and empty, I will remember that famous Transylvanian blessing, that we sang at the beginning of this service, and that the pilgrims and choir will sing for you in a moment. If we listen carefully, we can hear how the song takes us on a spiritual path, a kind of labyrinth that weaves back and forth. Listen to how each turn in the song opens up a space where the next good thing, the next realization, the next new perspective may enter in—whatever spiritual language we may speak. Listen to how the song helps us wind our way up from the valley floor to the mountaintop again. Remember, this is what it says:

Where there is faith, there is love.
Where there is love, there is peace.
Where there is peace, there is blessing.
Where there is blessing, there is God.
Where there is God, there, there is no need.

A Song for the Journey   Székely Áldas (Székely Blessing)        Transylvania Pilgrims
                                                                                      and Members of the FUCSJ Choir

Benediction                                                                            Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones

These are the words of Rev. Jozsef, from Homoródszentmárton: “You ask me what is a mountaintop experience? I’ll tell you: That is a good what happens with you sometimes, and anytime you remember that experience, you could live the whole again, because it is so strong for you, and gives the power you need to live the valley-days. What is a mountaintop experience? It is the moment you can share with your friends, living it together, and which strengthens the connection between you and them. It feels like—you could even fly like the birds, and through this you can feel the power of the Spirit.” Amen, shalom, salaam, and blessed be.