I was late to the Vigil of the Transfiguration, but I finally heard it

Last updated on: August 6, 2016 at 4:19 pm by Justin Tse

I was late to the Vigil of the Transfiguration, but I finally heard it 2016-08-06T16:19:24-07:00 Justin Tse

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Mosaic of the Transfiguration from Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai (Saint_Catherine's_Transfiguration) [PD-ART], via Wikimedia Commons

Mosaic of the Transfiguration from Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai (Saint_Catherine’s_Transfiguration) [PD-ART], via Wikimedia Commons

Maybe it’s the weird cadences of the Festal Menaion, but I found myself tripping all over myself in the Exodus reading, trying desperately to keep a chant recto tono (in one pitch) going while missing words and mispronouncing others. For all of my musings about reading yesterday, I was definitely not in reading shape when it came to this Vigil. I vaguely remember something now about Moses going up onto Sinai, but I do recall getting to the end, when my priest just intoned again, Wisdom. I continued onto the next Exodus reading and began tripping all over myself again, until I started to grasp a little bit of the drama of what was going on. In the second passage, Moses dialogues with God and asks to see G-d’s glory, at which point G-d tells him that he cannot see his face and live, so G-d will show him his back. I had a minor freak-out as I got to the end when I saw that the third passage was from Kings, and I didn’t yet see any connection between that and Exodus (indeed, I was that unprepared for this service), and therefore I wasn’t sure what to do when I got to the end, but I kept reading because this Exodus passage was like an old story coming back to me. At some other time, I’ll reflect more explicitly about how this passage has in fact been a constant presence in my life even while I was a Protestant – it has stayed with me from Chinese fundamentalism with a prosperity twist, Jesus Movement Bible college, New Calvinism (curious minds here may be satisfied with the explanation that John Piper’s second and unfortunately final real academic book, The Justification of God, focuses quite squarely on this passage), Anglicanism – and now it was coming back to me in Eastern Catholicism. Peace be with you, reader, my priest intoned at the end, and I replied, And with your spirit. And then instead of signalling me to go on with another Wisdom, my priest instead began to preach.

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