Unutterable Loveliness

'The Transfiguration of Christ', Epitaph of Johannes Göckerlein, c.1515, by Jacob Apt (1485-1518), Staatliche Museen, Kassel

‘It is one thing to see beauty and another thing to understand the secret of beauty. Let us ascend the Mount of Transfiguration and kneel with the apostles and see the face of Jesus shining, and let us try to understand the secret of His beauty.
 
If we may dare to use such language, the face of Jesus shone because He had found that for which He had been seeking all His life. He had found the Father’s will. All His life Jesus had been seeking His Father’s will. When the Blessed Mother and St Joseph found Him in the Temple, He was talking to the great Rabbis there about it. In His forty days of fasting in the wilderness He was seeking all the time to know it. Now He has spent the night in prayer, and that night was one of a succession of God know how many nights of profound and perfect prayer. As a result of this prayer came His perfect choice; as a result of that choice came the transfigured beauty of Jesus. He sees completely what the Father’s will is: that out of the human nature He has taken shall shine forth over the ages and over the whole universe the revelation of Love; and that that Love can only be shown by sacrifice, by going to the last length to which Love can go. In  that long night of prayer on the mountain we may believe that all the circumstances that would surely lead up to Calvary became clear to Him, and He accepted them with His will. With His own will He chose the bitterest path a man can know. There is the secret of the beauty of our Lord’s face as He was transfigured – the unutterable loveliness of His choice’.

​Father Andrew SDC, 1869-1946

O God, who on the holy mount didst reveal to chosen witnesses thine Only Begotten Son wonderfully transfigured, ​in raiment white and glistening: mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may be permitted to behold in the King in his beauty; who with thee, O Father, and thee, O Holy Ghost, liveth and reigneth, ever one God, world without end. Amen. - ​Divine Worship: The Missal.