Transparency in and Through Time

August 6, 2017

Cate Thorn

The Transfiguration of Jesus     Genesis 32:22-31     Luke 9:28b-36

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Transfiguration Sunday, Hiroshima Day, World Peace Day, a bit of a line up for one day is it not? World Peace Day, I imagine, arose in response to the event of Hiroshima Day. The day confronting us with the reality that human ingenuity misused will destroy life as we know it on this planet. The decision to use that technology in that bomb changed the balance of things. For there to be future on this planet, peace was no longer an ideological nicety it was a necessity. That first detonation took place on Transfiguration Day when brilliant light of divine glory overshadowed astonished disciples caught sleeping. On that day the brilliant light of fractured atom and shade of pluming cloud overshadowed we who were caught napping. Who are we to discern evil from good, we, capable agents of death, to act as if we have agency of life?

Today we are to speak of peace, but what do we know of peace? When we talk of peace, do we do so in terms of what it is not, not war, not conflict, not injustice? If so, our talk of peace is full of images of not peace, of war and conflict, disruption and dis-ease. What would it actually be like to live with peace, what would the world be like without the tension of war and conflict? War, conflict takes life, wastes time and consumes resource, for sure, but by diminishing possibility, defining immediate purpose it can also energise. It incentivises those who profit from its continuance and provides the rationale for those who work for peace. How do we live with peace? How can peace shift from being an absence of, a passive counterpart to active war or conflict, become a way of being and doing familiar to us?

The transfiguration is narrated as a moment in time, revealing a through time transparency. We could interpret it as Luke validating Jesus’ identity, his place in continuity and fulfilment of a faith lineage tradition. We could understand it revealing the porosity, the thin veil between the now we claim as real in historical, linear time and a continuum outside of time in which we’re held. Whichever way we do or perhaps don’t think this event took place, connectivity through time is presumed – connectivity, relationship, responsibility.

We might also understand Transfiguration to reveal the transparent interconnectedness of life in creation. Rather than depend only on our resourcefulness we humans could learn much from the multitude of other than human communities of life around us of how to live with, rather than against life. This last week I heard the story of the Japanese honey bee and its remarkable adaptation in response to its ongoing wrestle for life with the Japanese hornet. The hornet is a large and dangerous wasp it’s about five times the size of the honey bee. Both bee and hornet have similar types of colonies with a queen, a nest and larvae to feed. It is the job of the worker hornets to feed the larvae, the honey bees happen to be a great source of food. When a hornet finds a bees nest it kills a few bees then leaves a pheromone marker telling the other hornets a nest has been found and to come and help. Now a honey bee is unable to kill a hornet by stinging, biting or beating it to death. By contrast one hornet can kill 40 bees in a minute and 20 to 30 hornets can kill 30,000 bees in an hour, so it’s a real David and Goliath contest here. The pheromone marker the hornet leaves is also recognised by bee. Once they smell it they send about 100 bees to entice the hornet into the nest, they run into the nest and the hornet follows. The bees then turn and run back to the hornet and engulf the hornet in a ball, about 500–1000 bees. The bees disconnect their wings from the flight muscles and vibrate their flight muscles to generate temperature, they heat up the hornet. The lethal temperature for a hornet is about 2 degrees lower than that for a bee, the bees effectively kill the hornet by thermo-balling it. If the bees can kill the first few hornets the pheromone marker is dissipated so it won’t communicate to the other hornets and the bees nest is saved. Only the Japanese bee colonies have developed this form of defence, European bee colonies brought into Japan are unable to survive.

It is an intriguing evolution – notice the solution depends on the bee’s knowledge of the hornet and of themselves – it is a minutely nuanced knowledge – pheromones, lethal temperatures for survival, ability to separate flight muscles from wings. It is a collective solution enacted without using weapons, violence, venom, poison, biting or beating. The focus is not on destroying the hornet colony but on action needed to preserve the life of the bee colony and that is enough.

We know in our heads that violence breeds violence. We know if our life or livelihood is threatened we will act to defend ourselves. Increasingly on our world stage the “that which threatens” rhetoric is being used to separate us one from another, to disrupt and divide, to objectify any other as enemy. At the same time that which is threat or what that threat is or what is being threatened is less and less clear, it changes according to context. The emotions being stoked and stirred are those stimulated by situations of genuine threat, they are potent and powerful, demonising and dangerous, they freeze us in defence mode, we focus on surviving, not living. Negotiating peaceable outcomes that require risk of relationship are much less likely.

Consider again the bee colony. The solution was not focussed on the destruction of life but on what was needed for its continuity. It requires an intimate knowledge of those who are other, who are threat, to understand how to disempower the triggers that bring destruction. It also needs an intimate understanding of ourselves, to understand our responses to that which threatens us, threatens the continuity of life and trigger our destructive responses. As we look to one another we may find that which is ‘other’ looks a lot like us.

In this place we also have resource of a faith narrative. The account of Jacob’s wrestle with a figure at night is curiously apt for today. Jacob’s returning to meet his brother Esau, from whom he’s estranged. Their history of acrimony is due in large part to Jacob’s actions. This wrestle Karen Armstrong suggests, is as much about Jacob being reconciled with himself and his past as it is being reconciled with Esau and God. Jacob “is the first of the patriarchs to make a return journey. [From this time] it was no longer sufficient to “get up and go.” The patriarchs had to learn that no one could go forward creatively into the future without having made peace with the past. By facing his brother, Jacob would confront the “face” of his God; but he would also confront himself. Jacob was having to come to terms not only with his wronged brother, but with the “Esau” within. … Only when he confronted those aspects of himself that filled him with fear and disgust … could he heal the conflict in his soul and experience the healing power of the divine. … A mysterious stranger came to [Jacob] during the night and wrestled all night with him. At the end of the match, we hear, Jacob became aware that his fighting had been with his God. When he awoke he found himself profoundly blessed.”

Rabbi Alana Suskin writes, “Each and every one of us lives in a society that determines our feelings of what is “natural”, “right” and “rational.” These cultural biases are difficult to examine because they are like water to a fish – so ubiquitous and so pervasive, we simply do not notice them. Are the norms of one’s society, which are so deeply embedded within us that they feel “natural,” a compass toward what is what and good?” He suggests that “Religion offers us place to stand and examine the cultures in which we live. When we live and breathe the ways of our faith, it gives us compass by which to measure societal norms as separate from ourselves.”

In order for us to be able to move into the future and make real creative solutions for peace we, like Jacob, need to know not only that it is possible but that it’s incredibly important for us to return, to wrestle with, face and at least begin to make peace with our propensity to ‘make war’ evidenced in our past, dogging our present to become as the past was again. Through being willing to return, to engage wrestling with those things in us that trigger our destructive responses, we may find ourselves wrestling with those we make enemy. As we wrestle with the discomfort of honestly facing who we are, with all we’ve become, we may find, strangely, the face of our God before us, our God is the One with whom we’re embroiled. Jacob wasn’t left unmarked or unaffected by his encounter, renamed, with new identity. Honest encounter may redefine us. Are we willing to be marked as people who choose to name, act and speak against those who fan decisions and dialogues that provoke division and destruction? Transfiguration – connectivity, collected wisdom shared in time and through time. Are we the ones who listen and learn, take seriously our place, part and responsibility in this time for there to be a future time?