Moses came down off Sinai with light coming off his face, and the last person in the camp to find out was Moses. Aaron saw it. The whole camp saw it, and they backed away from him. Somebody had to tell him what had happened to his own face.
That detail has been sitting with me all week. August 6 is the Feast of the Transfiguration, so instead of going back to Sunday's readings the way I usually do midweek, I want to take the feast day's own: Exodus 34:29-35, 2 Peter 1:13-21, and Luke 9:28-36. They have been on the calendar for centuries and they are too good to skip. One idea runs through all three of them. What you look at is what you start to look like.
Moses, the veil, and the rhythm underneath it
Exodus tells us plainly that Moses didn't know his face was shining, and it gives the reason in the same breath: he had been talking with God. The shine was residue. It's what proximity does.
What happens next is the part I keep coming back to, and the reading spends four verses on it because it became a practice. Moses would speak with God with his face uncovered. Then he'd come out, tell the people everything he'd been given, and put a veil on. Go in, uncover, speak, come out, cover. Over and over, for years.
There were times he was completely available and times he was not, and he protected the difference with a piece of cloth. That's a rhythm most of us have lost entirely, and I think it costs us more than we notice.
The disciples almost slept through the whole thing
Luke's account of the mountain has a line the other Gospels don't. He tells us Peter, John, and James were weighed down with sleep, and that they saw the glory because they stayed awake.
Barely. That's the honest reading of it. They'd made a long climb, their eyes were closing, and the single most extraordinary thing any of them would ever witness was happening a few feet away while they fought to keep their heads up. Five more minutes of sleep and they'd have missed it.
I find that oddly encouraging. Glory tends to show up at the end of a long day, when we're too tired to look for it. Staying awake five more minutes turns out to be a spiritual act, and some weeks it's the only one available.
Luke also gives us Peter babbling about building three shelters, and then adds his own gentle note that Peter didn't know what he was saying. Peter wanted to make the moment permanent, to turn it into infrastructure. The cloud rolls in mid-sentence and cuts him off with a single instruction: listen to him. Not build for him. Not memorialize him. Listen.
Prosechō: a sailing word for paying attention
The epistle is where I wanted to spend real time. Second Peter is written by an old man who knows his death is close and who is trying to leave people something that will hold after he's gone. What he leaves them is this mountain. He was up there. He heard the voice. Decades later it's still what he reaches for.
Then in verse 19 he tells his readers to be attentive to it, the way you'd be attentive to a lamp burning in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.
The Greek behind "be attentive" is prosechontes, from the verb prosechō. Break it apart and you get pros, toward, and echō, to hold. Literally: to hold toward. To keep something turned in a direction.
In older Greek it's a sailing word. You prosechō a ship. You hold her toward the harbor, and you do it with constant small corrections, all night, because wind and current are always pushing you off. That's the word Peter chose for how a person pays attention to God. He is asking for something more physical than agreement. Hold your course, correcting as you go, because drift is assumed. The correction is the practice.
What we're actually looking at
Here's where this gets uncomfortable for me. If attention forms us, then it's worth being honest about where ours goes.
Moses looked at God and his face changed. The disciples looked at Jesus on a mountain and forty years later a dying man was still describing the light. And most of us are looking at a phone somewhere between three and five hours a day, picking it up more than a hundred times.
I'm not writing a lecture about screens. I'm on mine plenty. But the Moses detail is the one that should give us pause, because the change was invisible from the inside. He didn't feel his face shining. Nobody feels themselves becoming more anxious, or clocks the moment their baseline resting emotion became low-grade irritation. Formation just accumulates quietly, and then one day someone who loves you says something careful about how you've been lately, and you're the last to find out.
We're all shining with something. The only real question is what we've been looking at.
One small thing to try this week
Build a veil. Ten minutes in the morning with the phone in another room and something true in front of you: Sunday's Gospel, a psalm, the collect for the day. Ten minutes, pointed in one direction.
And expect to drift, because prosechō already assumes you will. The measure is whether you kept steering back.
The voice on that mountain gave exactly one instruction. Everything else is detail.
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