my posts have been few lately, because i really have been peregrinating (wandering around): port angeles and the olympic peninsula; victoria, british columbia; seattle; and now bellingham and its environs. last week a few good friends and i celebrated the feast of the transfiguration on sehome hill, our own little local mt. tabor.
it was a wonderful celebration, with glory from generation to generation in the church, (ages 10 months to 64 years), a chrismation, the liturgy, first fruits of several delicious sorts. we reflected on how appropriate a time this feast is for a chrismation, in which each christian is actually christed and sent into the world to show the glory of christ to all she or he meets. and we wondered what we would meet when we came back down onto the plain below.
the dark satanic mills in the picture above are being dismantled now, not because we are really creating jerusalem on whatcom's green and pleasant land, but because it's cheaper to make toilet paper in china.
perhaps we did not meet individually the son tormented by daemons at the bottom of the hill, although he lives there, sleeping in apartments with windows covered with posters for rock bands whose names seem to be compounded from words chosen for their hopeful offensiveness, "hanging" on the corners of railroad avenue, waiting for his next fix. we do not meet him, that son (or her, that daughter) because they are legion and we no longer see them. they have become the wallpaper of our modern madness.
before we went up sehome hill, i spent an hour on the campus of western washington university trying to see each of the hundreds of people who walked by as the icon of god they have been created to be. i confess, it was very hard. now, in some cases i suspect that is because their icon is pretty dirty, covered with the garbage of the sin of the world. but it is also hard because i walk around in my sleep most of the time. i do not see christ in my sisters and brothers or anywhere. i need to wake up to see christ only. pray my peregrinations will not be sleep walking.
