Iron & Altar

"When the disciples raised their eyes, they saw no one else but Jesus alone." - Matthew 17:8

Peter was still talking when the cloud came. He had a plan - three tents, a way to manage what was happening, to make it permanent, to do something with the moment. And the cloud interrupted him mid-sentence.

That is one of the most honest details in the Gospels. Peter's instinct in the presence of something overwhelming is to start constructing. He hears the voice from the cloud, falls on his face in the dirt, gets touched by Jesus, and stands up to find everyone else gone. Moses, Elijah, the cloud, the voice, the brightness - and what's left is Jesus standing there, telling him to get up and stop being afraid.

Peter held this for the rest of his life. He says in his letter: we were not following myths. We were eyewitnesses. We heard the voice. The prophetic word we carry is a lamp shining in a dark place.

Every man carries something from the mountain - some moment when the thing he could not explain happened and he knew something different than he knew before. A deathbed. A prayer that landed. A moment of clarity in the middle of a disaster. You are not required to talk about it constantly. But you know it was real. That is Peter's point.

Name the eyewitness moment in your own life - not a general sense of God's presence, but the specific time when something happened that you have not been able to explain away. Hold it today. And tell another man what it was. Peter wrote his down. There is something in naming the real experience out loud to another person that keeps it from fading into abstraction. Your testimony is not a myth.

Lord, when the cloud passes and everything else is gone, I want to see only you. And I want to be the kind of man who can say: we were there, we heard it, it was not a myth. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us. Amen.