Transfiguring experience is not granted to people as an easy and ready access to glory. Only in going up the mountain, rejecting and being rejected by the world, identifying with those who are most broken, does one encounter the divine refulgence...Our substitution of consumer tourism for pilgrimage, of canned experience for life-changing risk, is symptomatic of our inability to entertain in any way the reality of our own transfiguration.
~ from THE SOLACE OF FIERCE LANDSCAPES by Belden C. Lane
George Buttrick, an imaginative preacher, wrote poignantly, "We die with half our
music in us." How sad, not that we die, but that we leave so much unsung, not having
exhausted our melody.