Shimmering Scars
Melanie Childers
2/11/2024
When I was 9 years old, my middle brother Brian and I were babysitting our baby brother Jason. We were told not to let him leave the room we were staying in. At some point, the door got left ajar, and suddenly Jason was speed-crawling toward his escape. To this day there is some discrepancy about which of us it was, but either Brian or I rushed to shut the door before Jason escaped. Unfortunately, we weren’t fast enough, and the tip of Jason’s finger ended up on the other side of that door.
Even now, 45 years later, Jason’s transfigured finger is a little shorter than it should be. Otherwise, it largely healed itself and grew a nail back. And thankfully, it didn’t impair Jason’s ability to become a terrific trumpet player, a great dad, and a beloved band director. But it did leave its mark.
Younger folks may know transfiguration only as a particularly grueling course at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where Neville was never able to turn that thimble into a toad. Or maybe we associate transfiguration with shape-shifting superheroes like Plastic Man or the Incredible Hulk.
Otherwise, transfiguration is often relegated to those obscure theological words only mentioned by preacher-types: sanctification, atonement, eschatology, theodicy, transfiguration. But I’d like to demystify transfiguration today. Simply put, transfiguration is a noteworthy change in form or appearance. Not unlike Neville’s toad or Jason’s fingertip, it is a dramatic alteration that signals something profound is happening.
The transfiguration of Jesus has always seemed like a weirdly fascinating story to me. Jesus and three of his closest associates go up on a mountain to pray. While they’re up there, out of nowhere, Jesus’s face “shines like the sun” and his clothing is enveloped in a bright light. And then all of a sudden there are long-dead faith heroes Elijah and Moses talking with Jesus. Peter is terrified and amazed, and as usual doesn’t know what to say, so he stammers out an offer to set up tents so they can hang out in that place of ecstasy. But then this voice from heaven announces “This is my son, listen to him.” The light fades, the dead men disappear, and the whole thing is over in a flash. And on the way back down to reality, Jesus warns the disciples not to tell anybody what happened.
Scholars believe this was a turning point in Jesus’s life, the time when he and others began to realize that he was God-in-the-flesh, not just a strange guy from Nazareth who couldn’t conform to the status quo. Because even if his mother knew Jesus was somebody special, no one else really did, maybe. Until this coming-out moment when Jesus really gets it, and the disciples sort of get it. And nothing is really the same after that. It’s like a super-thin place among thin places, marking the space between this world and whatever mystical, holy, and sacred worlds might be beyond us, or within us, or right on the tip of our tongue.
We mere mortals may or may not tend to light up or talk to dead people on a mountaintop, but we have our moments of transfiguration too, don’t we? Many of us are able to identify mystical moments in our lives—thin places where we are ourselves, but something more. Moments that defy explanation, where time slows or where there is no time. Serious mindfulness practitioners know this experience. In my line of work as a hospital chaplain, I often hear of near-death experiences, or out-of-body experiences that change a person forever. I’ve had my own, too. Like the moment at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris when the choir I was singing with ceased to be a group of people and instead merged into a single shimmering entity of mystical sound. Or the day I and the only other woman in my seminary classroom left by crawling out the window rather than through the door, signifying discontent with the treatment of women in that place, and signaling that the voice I was finding would never again be silenced.
In religious circles the emphasis of transformation is almost always on the internal “spiritual” changes. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind…” Paul tells us in Romans. However, there are also many more transfigurations that are much more mundane, but no less holy. Rather than out of body, these in-the-body transfigurations are the very human, very earthy outward changes that our bodies go through every day of our lives. Since these typically get short shrift, I want to focus on those transfigurations too today.
Thanks to Renee Descartes and the rise of dualism, pitting the mind against the body, we have been told to dismiss, disparage, or ignore our physical bodies in favor of the mind’s superior qualities, and even the mind’s capacity to control the body. So, dualism has caused us to become disembodied selves in the mind-body split—unable to connect with, listen to, or appreciate our bodies. Dominant strands of Christianity have been complicit with this denigration of the body, and Scripture often supports it: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matt 26:41)… “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God… (I Cor 2:14).”
On the other hand, modern society idealizes a certain type of body as the standard by which we all should measure ourselves. Such nonsense!
We are “fearfully and wonderfully made, (Ps 139),” body and spirit, in as many beautiful forms as there are bodies. Mind is housed in matter, and as far as Mary Oliver and I can tell, spirit and body are inextricably linked: “The spirit likes to dress up like this… Ten fingers, ten toes. … Airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body.”
Can we consider for a moment that our spirit is expressed at least in part through our bodies? Can we celebrate the human body for its power, its miraculous capacity to heal, to survive and sustain itself, its amazing feats of dexterity and endurance, whether chosen or imposed? What if every bodily change we ever experience is a transfiguration, a sign that something important and holy is happening?
Our mere mortal bodily changes are sometimes not changes that we celebrate, except maybe birth. Puberty causes our bodies to transfigure in lots of awkward and confusing ways. Pregnancy brings that characteristic “glow” along with changes in weight, hair, and hormones. People who become injured or ill face dramatic, sometimes permanent transfiguration that requires major adaptations. Surgeries alter the body’s appearance and sometimes its functionality. Military actions and wars leave visible and invisible scars. Aging leaves indelible marks that I probably don’t have to explain. The death of a body causes a dramatic transfiguration as pulse and breathing cease and movement stills, and the body is returned to the earth.
We do have some influence over bodily changes. While some people self-injure as a survival technique, others sculpt their bodies at the gym or through physical labor. I won’t ask us to display all our tattoos and piercings this morning, but those are transfigurations of self-expression. And our trans and gender non-conforming siblings who may seek healthcare affirming their gender identity, or expand notions of gender beyond binaries, may transfigure into a body that finally feels like home.
Today’s Scripture invites me to consider all the transfigurations of our human bodies. And I believe these transfigurations too are holy.
Our bodily scars are like roadmaps of our life. Skin is the organ that creates a barrier between “me” and “the rest of the world.” When it is damaged, torn, cut, or attacked in some way, it often shows incredible resilience in its ability to heal. Sometimes this healing is assisted by surgery or medicine. But the remaining scars are unique to me. They indicate moments of my life that may be associated with trauma, sadness, illness, injury. The experiences may fade, and the scars may as well. But the markings on my body are indelible reminders of the moments of my life, the stories I’ve lived to tell. They often have deep meaning and help define and capture a piece of who we are.
One of my scars is a small triangle-shaped hardened area of skin on my right index finger. After this many years, you feel it more than see it, really. It came from hammering rebar into the side of a vertical hill in order to plant live stakes and help the earth heal from a landslide on our property in 2013. On one swing, my aim was off in just the right degree that I hit my finger instead of the rebar. To this day, when I rub that spot on my finger, I remember. At first, it was a wound, and a reminder only of pain and trauma. But in time, as I tell and retell the story to myself and others, the wound becomes a scar, and the reminder is not so much of trauma, but of the connection to the land that the trauma invoked, the closeness that my partner Cath and I felt to each other and the land as we worked through those challenges, and later the resilience, and the beauty that was restored after years of tender care.
In her 2022 master’s thesis for UT Knoxville, Bethany Craig wrote that “…scars are a form of bodily cartography which map, mark, inscribe, and pinpoint the experiences of our spatial movements through time, location, and emotion. … Whether from accident, medical necessity, conflict, or self-infliction, scars link us to space and place-based memories. They are commemorations, … of an emotional endurance, a memory inscribed in flesh. … The images and storytelling exposed through visible scarring become a visual form of history … brutality, trauma, resistance, and celebration.”
Our bodies understand transfiguration, disfiguration, and reconfiguration as a daily occurrence. We are not invincible, and disease or deadly injury sometimes overwhelm the body’s natural healing capacity. The body is vulnerable. It is not designed to live forever, and it cannot survive under certain parameters. Some of us have tended loved ones’ bodies when illness or injury was not survivable. And marginalized bodies especially are routinely destroyed, maimed, and exploited in wars and unjust human relationships.
Bodies know constant change. It may be said that we are dying from the moment of birth. And yet, amid all that cell replacement, shape-shifting, slowing and aging, the body works hard to give us the best chance possible to experience life to its fullest.
Perhaps Jesus’s transfiguration was a blend of his earthy earthly body and his exalted divinity. A dazzling, disquieting flash on top of a common man who ate with the untouchables, who knew hunger and thirst, who kicked up dust with his sandals and got toothaches and blisters. … “Awe” on top of “Ow.”
Some writers even see Jesus’ transfiguration as a celebration of queerness. If you think about it, Jesus was a shape-shifter. He walked between so many worlds, but didn’t quite fit into any of them. Like us, he was human and divine; like us, he maybe didn’t fully grasp all of that. Jesus’s body was planted in history, in politics, in time and space—but it also transcended those definitions. Jewish theologian Susannah Heschel depicts Jesus as a theological cross-dresser, unsettling the boundary between Judaism and Christianity.
Writer Celine Chuang adds: “In the transfiguration story, we see the exaltation of Jesus’ hybrid body, … his borderland body. … God reveals Godself in bodies that disrupt the norms and transgress the lines.”
Chuang goes on to remind us: “God does not meet us in some otherworldly plane, but in our bodies. God meets us in our sore backs and our bandaging of bruised knees and our roughened hands from doing the dishes. God meets us in the transitioning and transforming of our bodies through age, gender, birth, and illness. Knowing and attending to our bodies, and the bodies of others: this is holy work.”
Perhaps Jesus’s transfiguration is offering all of us a glimpse of our own blend of humanity and divinity—awe on top of ow. Our bodies AND spirits are amazing. On rare sacred moments, we can shimmer in the thin places. It’s hard to miss those exceptional mystical transfigurations when they grace us in life. But remarkably, the equally sacred everyday transfigurations that make us who we are often get lost in the daily grind. It’s important to remember that we also shimmer in the everyday holiness of tending each other’s wounds, and making sense of the scars that plot our life. Awe AND Ow.
Sacraments are instruments of mysterious and sacred significance. What if we saw our bodies as a holy sacrament? As mysterious and sacred aspects of who we are? As sources of wisdom and deep knowing and survival and passion? How might we treat our bodies differently if looking through this lens?
Just by being you—all of you—exactly you—you have the opportunity to be a disrupter, a cultural cross-dresser, a person unafraid to celebrate goodness, to call out injustice, to wade into the murky mess of life and upset the status quo by showing up unabashedly as your true self.
Transfiguration is not just on the mountaintop, but in the valleys and hollers of our everyday lives. And I believe it is all holy and sacred. You matter. Tattoos, piercings, stretch marks, scars, varicose veins, arthritic joints, wrinkles and all. You are beautiful. Your survival and resilience are miraculous. You are being transfigured every day of your life.
In a world that teaches us to be ashamed of our bodies, or to think they need fixing to meet society’s narrow standards of beauty, Sonya Renee Taylor, author of The Body is Not an Apology, reminds us that it is a revolutionary act to love our bodies as they are and especially as they decline. It’s radical to radiate love for ourselves, to model that for others, to tell the stories of our scars, to make meaning of and celebrate a body that always does its best for us.
You have a body that works hard for you every day. It fights illness, tells you what you need, alerts you to danger, allows you to experience the world around you, heals itself, keeps hundreds of processes going every minute of the day without your help, allows you to interact with others, and stores your memories. And in flashes of transcendence, it transports you to a different realm.
I challenge myself and all of us to celebrate our bodily transfigurations at least as much as we mourn them. In my work I am reminded every day that vastly more people get a chance to be young than to grow old. So yes, seize those mystical moments of “awe” in the thin places. But also, find the holy shining through the “ow” of the blisters and wrinkles and the scars inscribing our bodies. The severed fingertips that heal and play beautiful music. May we celebrate the embodied holiness of how our spirit has chosen to dress up.
BENEDICTION
May you go forth from this place honoring your body--
the wiggly restless ones that can’t sit still,
the tense ones that desperately need to relax,
the clumsy, heavy, disjointed ones,
the gently used, good as new ones, the worn-out ones,
the surgically improved ones, the ones showing their age.
The world needs you to trot out your beautifully transfigured body
and practice celebrating being you.
Perhaps there is no holier work.
Go in peace, body and soul. Amen.
The Body is Not an Apology, Second Ed.: The Power of Radical Self-Love, by Sonya Renee Taylor and Berrett-Koehler Publishers
The Spirit Likes to Dress Up, poem by Mary Oliver
