Put the mind in the heart- A song for the Transfiguration

Taken from the Philokalia, 

Put the mind in the heart
Put the mind in the heart
Stand before the Lord
With the mind in the heart

On this day of the Feast of the Transfiguration, I invite you into this quote from Belden Lane's brilliant book The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. The chapter is called Sinai and Tabor, where Lane goes into incredible detail, marking pilgrims to these mountains, like the late 4th century woman Egarius, and the Armenian pilgrim Elisaeus, but also points out the eastern orthodox tradition's way of seeing the mountains as apophatic and kataphatic symbols.

"Central in all of this is the conviction that the sudden, blinding light of divine radiance, as it momentarily appears in human experience, must ever be framed within a context of the utterly mundane, with all the harsh, prosaic discipline it demands. When the desert-mountain tradition does not patently reject ecstatic experience as untrustworthy, it stringently insists that "moments of splendor" serve the purposes of justice and responsibility in the ordinary life."
- Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes
​

Icon of the Transfiguration - Theophanes the Greek