I am so glad there were no DVD players 2000 years ago. Nor cameras, nor anything that could record the event as it happened. I'm not a great one for recording of weddings etc. I think that dulls the very essence of the memory and lessens those intense happenings your mind fixes on to that make it unique and significant for you. When you watch back an intense and transformational moment as literal history like a video of a wedding or a pilgrimage or even just a holiday, the poetry is lost. It just becomes a wysiwyg moment (what you see is what you get). But that isn't faith. That isn't memory. Remembering puts things together that weren't necessarily together originally, it speaks into and out of things that led up to the experience, that helps enrich the experience in your soul rather than in your photograph album, and it helps reflect and embody the experience.
Memories aren't pictures. They are feelings and emotions and crunches in the soul too. Poetry brings them alive and retelling the experience from memory rather than a photograph makes it real because you can't help yourself but embellish and go off at tangents, and associate it with other experiences and stories. Photos are cold. It's often the insignificant parts that make it real: I remember my wife squeezing my hand so tight during our wedding I couldn't feel my fingers. They were all full of pins and needles when it was finally set free. Camera don't capture that sort of thing. Peter blabbering on, the idea of tents being built, the sudden disappearance of the prophets are what are remembered clearly here. These are memories of the soul.
So perhaps we ought to take this transfiguration story as the remembering of things rather than the recorded action. It speaks into and reflects on and turns into poetry all the other epiphanies and rememberings leading up to this moment rather than one solitary event on the mountain. It's remembered, not recorded and the poetry that is remembering is what makes this such a significant and important story of faith.
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