Has that ever happened you? The antidote, as Paul pointed out, is to think beyond yourself to others: God, heavenly things rather than only those of this world, and Jesus who will come again.

The most crucial thing about mountaintop experiences is to hold onto them and not forget what you’ve seen and recognized. The Eucharist is this kind of elevated view from above: We see Jesus transformed, hear the voice of God speaking to us, commune with patriarchs and prophets, apostles and saints. We discover that time and space and we ourselves are not what we thought. Then we come down and go on our way, possessors of a powerful memory.

I was sitting in St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin reading when a young man walked over to me and began chatting. He asked me one or two questions about where I was from and then spent the next hour talking about himself.

We seek your presence, O Lord. Do not hide your face from us as we offer you our prayers.

From this darkness we look to our light, to Easter and to the knowledge that our citizenship is in heaven, to the time when we shall enjoy the bounty of the LORD in the land of the living—where our lives will be, like Jesus’, changed in appearance and will conform with his glorified body.

Peter gets the Transfiguration wrong, as he does so many things at first.

Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end . . . we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself. —Thomas Merton