So many seasons have come and gone and these tall, majestic tress have waited, waited for someone to linger just a moment -- long enough to hear the word they speak, grasp their wonder and beauty, perfect symmetry of trunk and branch -- revealing their essence to the one who has eyes to see and the heart to share a joyful moment with another.
Transfiguring experience is not granted to people as an easy and ready access to glory. Only in going up the mountain, rejecting and being rejected by the world, identifying with those who are most broken, does one encounter the divine refulgence...Our substitution of consumer tourism for pilgrimage, of canned experience for life-changing risk, is symptomatic of our inability to entertain in any way the reality of our own transfiguration.