The Voice of God and our Doubt

       In the early eighties, Rosie and I went to Israel with a number of friends.  We, traveled to Galilee and to Mount Tabor, which is the traditional site of the Transfiguration of Jesus.  At the mountain, our tour bus was met by a flock of taxicabs, all driven by Palestinians who took us by way of a twisty mountain road to the top.  We met other taxis coming down and the road didn’t seem to be wide enough for both of the cars.  We narrowly passed each of them.  I don’t think I have ever been as frightened in my life.

After this treacherous trip, we found ourselves in a glorious place.  There was a basilica there and a crowd of German tourists singing a familiar hymn inside.  Strangely, there was a low fog covering the top of the mountain and it reminded me very much of the story told in Luke’s gospel about the time that Jesus was on the mountain with his disciples and they were all shrouded in mist and Jesus shined in their presence.  They were terrified on this mountain also.  But out of the cloud came the voice of God which said This is my Son, my Beloved!  Listen to Him! That this happened is testified to by Saint Peter himself in his first letter when he recounts this story and reports what the voice said to them when they were with Jesus on the mountain.

I took a picture of the mist shrouding the basilica and it hung in my office for a number of years.  It always reminded me of the terror that I felt on our way up to the top of that mountain, and the mist that seems to surround all of the claims of religion.  It reminded me that we don’t know as much as we think we know and that our job as Christians is to trust in the God who gave us our lives and our salvation that what we have been told is true in the best sense of the word, even though the accountable proof of any of it seems to be rather scant.

     While we were in Israel, we found little concrete evidence that Jesus was ever there.  Years and years of people living in that country has covered up any trace of what investigators might call proof of much of anything.  We visited the tomb of Jesus in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the memorial altar there to the crucifixion.  We went to Bethlehem and saw the silver star under the altar in the Church of the Nativity, but all of these places are approximate and nobody really knows where the actual sites really are.

The only real proof that I saw was in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher  at the altar depicting Golgotha, where a young nun stood weeping against a wall.  That was enough for me to understand the depth of the faith that she brought to that site and the profound understanding that she took away with her when she left.  We also were touched intensely by this whole trip and brought home with us a more mature faith in the Jesus whom we had not seen on the trip, but knew much better for our experience.

Isn’t that always the case?  We go to our churches every Sunday and say our prayers and receive the sacrament, but concrete evidence of the things that we believe and profess with our hearts is not always so obvious.  Like the disciples on the mountain, our faith is also shrouded in mist and we wait for the voice of God to help us to understand what it is that we have seen and what we believe.

There’s nothing wrong with that.  Evidence is difficult to pinpoint and is hard to talk about.   We share our faith experience in the context of a community because we all hold this faith in common and don’t demand proof from each other.  The real proof of our faith is in the way that we live our lives.

In another account of the Transfiguration, when Jesus along with Peter, James and John came down from the mountain, they found the rest of Jesus’ followers trying to heal a person and failing miserably.  Jesus touched the man and he was healed instantly.  Such is the nature of our faith.  The real proof comes with what we do with what we have been given.  When we follow our Lord’s teaching and do what he taught us, our faith is seen by others in a profound way.  That is what that nun taught me with her tears.  It was like the voice of God out of the mist telling me a truth that I could never have understood any other way.   May God always bless our doubts and our fears and give us those beautiful times when we  know with momentary certainty that what we believe with our hearts is the truth.