Intense Moment on a Mountaintop

Bear with me on this little ramble, folks... it does relate to this chapter.

I'm currently enrolled in an online course called The Universe Story. It's a history of the Universe's unfolding since the initial flaring forth 13.7 billion years ago. The sacrificial nature of the Universe is one of the compelling pieces that (for me) links this story to Christ.

In our culture, most people avoid pain, suffering, even sacrifice, at all costs. Yet it seems Christ was the only one who understood that the way God ordered the unfolding of time and space, galaxies and evolving life on planet Earth, required death. Required that one species be sacrificed to nourish and bring forth the next. Millions of years ago the first cells realized they could eat each other to live. That way of nourishing ourselves has been passed down to today's life forms. Some species eat plants, others eat animals, humans do both. It is an intricate web, each part sustaining and complementing the others, but all are a part of the whole web of life. For humans to believe that we need not play the game as other life forms do, is both blasphemy and idiocy. As we continue to destroy and degrade all life forms (in an attempt to make our own lives more comfortable) we end up destroying ourselves. The transfiguration was a glimpse of glory... heaven on earth, the kingdom come. Gire thinks that everything paled in the face of that astounding light. My sense would be that everything glowed even brighter because of it. Here finally was one human being with the face of God, who could see and understand the ways of God and was trying to teach them to his fellow humans. But as Peter did, we do. Let's memorialize the event and then we won't have to live it ourselves. Christ was trying to tell us... no guts, no glory. Literally.