And They Were Terrified as They Entered the Cloud

Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. … [A] cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.
(Luke 9:28-32,34-36, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition

When we looked at the Transfiguration a few months ago, I reflected on Peter’s misguided desire to build shrines to Moses, Elijah, and Jesus. This time around, I’d like to focus more directly on the experience of the three apostles.

Why do the apostles feel terror as they enter the cloud?

I recently read Sarah Hinlicky Wilson’s Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration looking for an answer to that question. Wilson digs into the scriptural resonances of all four accounts of the Transfiguration in the New Testament, and she has a lot to say about the cloud—connecting it to the cloud that accompanied the ancient Israelites as Moses led them out of Egypt, the visible sign of God’s presence. Just seeing that cloud nearby filled the Israelites with awe. What must it feel like to find oneself completely enveloped in such an atmosphere?

Exhausted, half-awake, Peter, John, and James can barely comprehend what they’ve seen in the moments leading up to the cloud’s arrival. They do recognize Moses and Elijah, though, so Peter in particular latches onto them in his struggle to find meaning in what he’s just seen. 

That rings true, I think. If any of us had been through what Peter experienced, we would likely scramble to make sense of it just as he did. And if we’d just spent several months on an immersive spiritual journey, we would probably leap straight to the divine for an explanation, too.

Here I can speak from some experience, though not nearly as dramatic an experience as what Peter and his friends witnessed. When what happened happened, my mind immediately, intuitively registered it as an incursion of the divine. But reasonable, rational explanations quickly followed—so I can only say that something happened to me that I do not fully understand, something I have chosen to consider in a certain light. Following through on the implications of this choice brought me back to Quaker meetings after a long absence, commencing a journey that has, despite some bumps along the way, improved my life in just about every regard that matters.

What about the cloud, though?

As I’ve sat with the story of the Transfiguration, I’ve come to see the cloud as a literalization of a particular stage in a mystical experience. You’re living your life out in the mundane world when suddenly, for whatever reason, the divine intrudes itself upon your existence and makes its presence felt. You register this, you try to process it, and you get a tentative grip on what just happened. Maybe you push it away as a dream or a hallucination; maybe you accept it as a revelation.

Then it breaks free of that tentative grip, forcing you to confront the fact that you just went through something profoundly weird that has disrupted your relationship with reality, and what do you plan to do about that?

Terror strikes me as an entirely appropriate response to such a situation.

The cloud swallowed up Peter, John, and James, and they understandably freaked out. But the long, roundabout journey they had made with Jesus—listening to his parables, witnessing his miracles—provided them with a way out of the darkness, a directive that made clear, unequivocal sense of what they had just seen. It scared them a little, and they didn’t want to talk about it with anyone else—it did, after all, still sound pretty freaky—but they had a frame of reference they could work from moving forward, even if they still didn’t fully understand it. 

I didn’t find myself in a literal cloud, and though I felt profound uncertainty, I can’t say that I felt terror. Just as the three apostles had been primed to recognize Jesus as the Chosen, though, events in my spiritual life had set me up to come to a different (though still Christ-informed) understanding. Not better, not lesser—just different.

If you’ve had similar experiences, you’ll have reached your own conclusions—or you may still be trying to feel your way out of the cloud. I’ve found the Religious Society of Friends a congenial environment for sorting this stuff out, a place where you can find others who’ve faced what you’ve faced, or will at least take your questions and concerns seriously. Perhaps most importantly, Friends might tell you what worked for them, but they know to step back and let Spirit deliver the message it has that speaks to your condition.