Someone recently asked me: Why do you use the icon of the Transfiguration in this article? The simple answer is: The Lord’s Transfiguration expresses the true focus of Eastern Christian spirituality. The journey of life is all about discovering the life of God within us – to come to a deep and true understanding that God IS the life-force that animates us. Spirituality deals with the transfiguration of my attitudes and behaviors. These are only changed when I begin to recognize that God is within me.
Many people have a strong desire for wholeness and a longing to be fully human. The key is Christ’s incarnation, the mystery of one person in whom divinity and humanity are fully united. If we are looking for the perfect, most spiritual human being, we cannot look elsewhere but at Jesus. It is in Him that the divine and human meet. If we really want to find what is fully human, we have to look at Jesus. If we really want to know who God is, we must look to Jesus. In Him we see that the key to being fully human and, at the same time, fully divine is to be fully loving – that is unconditional love for all others, regardless of who they are and what they do. The incarnation is the full expression of love and love is the nature of God. Whatever helps us to love brings us nearer to God. What the world is looking for is the full expression of love which is fully expressed only by Jesus, the Son of man and the Son of God.
The biggest problem that we encounter in life is our society’s understanding of love. It has truly become skewed because of all the phony ideas that pervade the media. Perhaps the primary characteristic of true love is that it is self-sacrificing and, of course, unconditional. The love that our modern world seems to promote is truly conditional. How many times have we heard: I’ll love you if? It is only when we are willing to give one hundred percent of our love to another, without even an expectation of being loved in return, is our love truly love.
God’s love for us is unconditional. He truly places NO CONDITIONS on His love for us. Think about this!