the feast of the transfiguration

One of my goals this year is to stay more in tune with the liturgical calendar of the church, and I’ve tried to pick 1-3 feast days or saints each month to celebrate and explore more deeply. A large amount of this was shaped by what books I was able to find, especially for the saints, but I also tried to choose feasts commemorating important Biblical events as well. So we began August (the 6th, to be precise) with the Feast of the Transfiguration.

We read the story from Archbishop Tutu’s children’s Bible, The Children of God Storybook Bible, and then walked through the story again while making meringue cookies.

First we separated three egg whites into a bowl, symbolizing the three disciples, and added 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar, symbolizing Jesus, and then we whipped with the beater until they rose into peaks in the bowl like the four men climbed up the mountain. It was a long walk, just like we had to stand and beat the egg whites for a long time! But at the top of the mountain, Elijah and Moses appeared before them (1 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla and a dash of salt), and the glory of God shone around them (2/3 cup sugar, added gradually). At this point I let the kids taste the meringue batter, if they wanted (Aubade loved it). This is good, we realized, and if we weren’t paying attention to our recipe, we might want to stop right here just like Peter wanted to stay up on the mountain with Jesus and Moses and Elijah. But just like Jesus and the disciples came back down the mountain to share their experience and knowledge of God’s love and purpose with the rest of humanity, so too our meringues have to bake (at 250 for 45 minutes, with at least an hour in the oven cooling after turning it off) so that we can share their delicious goodness with others. It would have been best for the story to give some away, at this point, but we ended up eating them all ourselves since I didn’t really know who would want them…

The kids seemed to take away a feeling that good things often require time and effort – the journey up the mountain for the disciples, the time beating and baking for the meringues. The part that stood out most to me this year, that I hadn’t thought much of before, was one of the reasons for coming back down the mountain, a reason for any special experience or understanding of God: not just to draw closer to God ourselves, but also to be able to pour back into God’s people, to give back to the world that He loves and is redeeming. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, “God comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”