DUCCIO DI BONINSEGNA, The Transfiguration of the Lord

The Christian holidays
by ENZO BIANCHI
The Transfiguration is the sign worked by God to conform us to his Son, till he makes us like him; it is also the warrant that all our being will be transfigured

O Cristo parola di vita

“I’ve seen a great light!”. This is what a young Japanese mother, who lived about a hundred kilometers far from Hiroshima, cried running back into home in the morning of August 6, 1945 hugging his little ten-year-old son, Kenzaburo Oe, who later got the Nobel Prize for Literature. The atomic bomb had made its tragic appearance on mankind’s horizon. A light of death and devastation. And yet Christians cannot avoid connecting that date (August 6) and that experience (“a great light”) to the feast of the Lord’s Transfiguration, which is celebrated exactly on that date since the IV century in the East and the XI century in the West.

The Gospel according to Matthew describes that indescribable event with these words: “Jesus was transfigured (literally “he changed his appearance”) before Peter, James and John: his face shone like the sun and his garments became as white as light” (Matthew 17:2). In this feast, which is almost ignored or inattentively celebrated because of the elation caused by summer holidays by which many Christians are caught, Christ’s face is contemplated, a face that is radiant with a light addressed to the whole universe, to the whole mankind because it is the light of God’s life which wants to reach each creature through Christ: a light of life and communion.