We often want to "set up booths." When we feel good with God, in some "spiritually comfortable" setting, in a community, in a monastery, in the Church... We think it is very proper and pious to want always to be here.

Little Therese of Lisieux wrote:
"To live by love is not to set up booths,
Even after climbing Mount Tabor:
It is to go toward Your voice that calls,
To look at the Cross without turning one's gaze away."

When we want to "set up booths," we want to stop, to get stuck in spiritual experiences that are pleasant to us, to keep them for ourselves. At times we need this; spiritual rest is necessary. Jesus took with Him onto the mountain those who would have to be with Him in the garden of Gethsemane. He wants us to go farther, so that we do not seek the experience of His presence, but always and everywhere live as if we were on Mount Tabor, even when we do not feel and do not see the light of Tabor. This light must be within us.

We may never again experience this joy of the Transfiguration, but it is enough for us to know what awaits us ahead, and Who awaits us on our path, at times heavy and thorny. But He walked a more difficult path, and He, our God, wants us to follow Him.

The disciples go up after Jesus, become witnesses of His transfiguration, see His glory, and hear the Father's word about the Son. Three evangelists tell of this event, and all three connect it with Christ's words that some of His disciples will see the Kingdom of God come with power. If this really was a "taste of the Kingdom," then how does the disciples' experience differ from ours?

We, like them, try to follow Christ (sometimes successfully, sometimes not, just as they did); we believe in His glory, in His divinity; through His words in the Gospel we hear the voice of the Father... The only thing we lack is the experiential sensation, as vivid as the one that seized the disciples then in the radiance of unearthly light. But have we not been told: "...blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" (John 20:29)? Do we not taste the Kingdom even before death, uniting ourselves by faith with its Source?

The Transfiguration is a prototype of the Kingdom. More precisely, it is the Kingdom itself, revealed for now only locally, in connection with one Person alone - the One who brought this Kingdom into the world. In essence, the Transfiguration was nothing other than the manifestation of the Savior's transfigured bodily life, His human nature, a manifestation of it in the form it has in the Kingdom when the Kingdom is fully revealed.

In the fallen world the Kingdom is not yet fully revealed; it is only entering it. Therefore the manifestation of transfigured humanity in it occurs only as an exception and is visible not to everyone, but only to those who have already shared sufficiently in the life of the Kingdom. Such was the manifestation of the Savior's transfigured human nature. In essence, this was His real human nature, the one that fully corresponded to His spiritual state.

Remaining in the human body familiar to us was for Him a kind of self-emptying, what theologians call kenosis. In this case, the true state of God or of a person is hidden from those to whom God or the person reveals himself. For God, kenosis is the only possibility for communion with humanity, but for a person too kenosis often becomes absolutely necessary if his spiritual state differs significantly from the state of those with whom he has to communicate. Jesus as Man had to resort to kenosis not only in order to communicate with ordinary people, but simply in order to remain in our fallen world.

Now, on the Mount of Transfiguration, He appeared to the disciples as He truly was, in His real body. It is not surprising that the disciples perceived this manifestation as a miracle; it was indeed a miracle, an invasion of the Kingdom into our world. It is no accident that immediately after the Transfiguration Jesus begins to tell the disciples about the path He must take so that the Kingdom may enter the world completely and in fullness. The disciples are still perplexed. Much time will pass before they understand everything, but that is inevitable: every understanding has its time.