Anyone who knows me, knows I have been an active gamer for over 30 years. A few nights ago I was playing Fortnite with a few friends. Some of the older guys in the voice chat were making some off-color comments, and I found myself joining in. One of the younger boys said, “You must not be much of a minister.” It shook me to my core. First, because it made me doubt myself on some level; secondly, because it had some truth to it. Here I was acting just like everyone else out there in the world. Falling into my “old ways.” Another younger guy, a teen, started defending me. Trying to justify this as “my place to unwind and be my self.” Almost as if he was saying “This is where the real guy can be himself, instead of acting all holy and pious.” That too is a misunderstanding of things, and I think the Transfiguration is the perfect day to talk about it.
One of the biggest things I think that we misunderstand about the transfiguration is that people see it as a moment in which God transformed Jesus. As if like Optimus Prime from the Transformers had just gone from being a rig to this big warrior robot. It was less of a transformation and more of a revelation. What the disciples saw happen on the mountain was not a glimpse of who Jesus was going to become, not some changing of who the man was before them, but a removal of the veil of our mortal eyes so they could see who Jesus already was. It was a glimpse of the “real” that most of us long for in this life.
That’s what the mistake is in our current world. We see ourselves as faulty individuals with no hope of being perfect like Jesus, rather than who God tells us we are. We spend so much time living in the world that we forget the “real” is beyond what we can see, hear, and touch. There is this beautiful line in the Morning Prayer for today that says “today the Lord was transfigured and the voice of the Father bore witness to him.” Why do we then spend so much time listening to 
who the world tells us we are, instead of listening to who the Father bears witness that we are? Who is the real us?
It would be so easy to listen to the one young man who encouraged me to be just like everyone else in the secret moments of a computer game where no one knows who I am. That’s not who I am though. The real me isn’t the one who conforms to the world, but the one who lives the life I have been created to live. Walter Burghardt once wrote that contemplation was a “long loving look at the real.” I would say that that’s what our faith is all about. Not just us taking a long loving look at God, but God taking a long loving look at his creation. Then living a life that lets everyone else see what it is that God sees when he looks at us.
A reflection on the readings for the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6th, 2018 by Brian Mullins.