John looked at the icon. He had prayed before it for years. It leaned against a moving box on his desk filled with items he wasn’t ready to unpack. Sitting back in his office chair, he regarded it with a strange new unfamiliarity.
It was the Transfiguration. In happier times, the Transfiguration took up a place in the family prayer corner just below, but slightly forward of, the family icon of Christ. It always gave John a theological impression that one only reaches Christ through a transfiguration of one’s own.
This impression was theologically…inaccurate. Nonetheless, John couldn’t shake it. He always felt that one would only understand Christ after achieving some kind of transformation. If I overcome X, I will be granted Y. If I do A, I’ll understand B. If this, then that.
He had pondered it many times over the years, knowing that there was something there, something just on the other side of some invisible veil. Sometimes he caught a glimpse, or so he liked to think.
Now, though, in the dark and quiet of the morning, the silence was just…silence.
His gaze drifted to the wedding band on his desk. He’d put it on a coaster engraved with his company’s logo. A promotional item. One of hundreds he still had laying around in boxes, storage units, and probably under his car seat. It reminded him of gemstone displays he’d seen at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in DC.
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