Near the front entrance of the monastery we have a rose which has bloomed throughout the summer, allowing us to fill vase after vase with creamy peach rosebuds that open slowly and gloriously. According to Armenian tradition, the feast of the Transfiguration goes back to the early fourth century, when St Gregory the Illuminator substituted it for a pagan celebration of Aphrodite under the title Vartavarh (Roseflame). He kept the old name for the Christian feast because "Christ opened his glory like a rose on Thabor." I like to think of that whenever I look at our rose. I also like to think of the monks of Cluny who popularised the feast in the Middle Ages. Best of all, I like to think of the mystery of light which so informs the Transfiguration story and the collect for the Second Sunday of Lent which seeems to express both the event and the necessary response with an economy of words I can only marvel at. Did the transfiguration occur at night? What did Peter, James and John really see to leave them so awed and dazed? Would it be presuming too much to guess that they experienced in a unique way what is occasionally given in prayer for a moment or two (though how does one measure time in prayer?) and that it took a lifetime of reflection to make sense of it? That it could only be made sense of in the light of Easter, so that we too can only "make sense" of the mystery through the life of grace begun at baptism and sustained through prayer and reception of the sacraments?

Of course, for us now, there is another and darker aspect to today. Who can forget that 6 August is also the anniversary of Hiroshima? Light connects the two, though there is a world of difference between the divine illumination of the one and the diabolical glare of the other. The statistics of nuclear stockpiles make sobering reading. More sobering still is the knowledge that human beings have not learned the lessons of the last sixty-four years, that homo sapiens is only a whisker away from descending into homo vastans. We need a transfiguration of minds and hearts, something for which to pray today.

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