How are we transformed? How do we display that transformation to others? We are at the end of the Epiphany Season in the church calendar today and we are provided with a mysterious transformation: Jesus' transfiguration on the mountain. So much of this Epiphany Season is about transformations and change. All of these accounts we have heard these past few weeks about healings and casting out of demons and curing the sick, they all concern some form of change, some kind of transformation happening. And they all involve mystery..... There is mystery in most transformations.

In the early 1990s I was living in the Greenwich Village area of NYC with my partner at the time. One Saturday night we decided to go to The Roxy. The Roxy was a dance club, the kind that opened its doors at midnight, although no self-respecting individual would be seen arriving until after one a.m.  (This was in a non-regular-church-going- period in my life.) We had a good time and left a bit after closing time, taking a cab home in that early morning, dawn approaching time. The cab stopped diagonally across the street from our apartment on Sixth Avenue and West 11^th Street. We got out and started across 6^th Avenue. We were not holding hands, or hanging on each other, just walking side by side heading toward the apartment door, both of us tired and we were not paying attention to our surroundings very closely.

We were about 50 yards from the apartment building door when we heard: Hey it's faggots! Let's get em! Mel and I looked across 11^th Street and there was a group of young men, I'm guessing now but I would estimate about five or six of them, starting to cross the street to us. Without speaking to one another Mel and I ran, flat out, to the apartment building door. We got through the exterior door, which did not lock behind us and somehow I was able to get the key to the inside foyer door into the lock without fumbling or dropping the key. We pushed through the inside door as the group pursuing us was coming through the outside door. Mel and I had to physically shove that thick glass door with all our might to get it closed because of the pursuers pushing on it trying to get to us. But we were able to close it securely. They pounded on that door, yelling epithets and curses. Again, without speaking, Mel and I walked away from the door to the staircase at the other end of the entry hall and proceeded up to our apartment. We did not speak about it that night (or rather morning) and I do not remember ever talking about the incident with him. We told no one about the incident. I now know that we were transformed, we were changed because of this incident.

Mel and my close call came to mind recently when I heard, on the news, about the homeless man who was beaten up a few miles from here, outside of a grocery store. He died on the sidewalk, having lain there for more than 20 minutes with hundreds of people walking by him. One individual actually reached over his prone body to load his car with groceries. The individual who caused this man's death was caught. Apparently there had been a verbal altercation, and the homeless man called his attacker a fag, which in the attacker's mind justified his actions: in his mind it is okay to beat a man senseless and to walk away to let him die because he had been called a faggot. Besides being beyond shocking, this is emblematic of an area where transformation and change are vital: where a different kind of transformation from what we may normally think about needs to occur. How do we effectuate such a transformation? How do we cause a change in people's attitudes and understanding so as to transform hatred and violence due to sexual orientation to something else?

Another kind of needed transformation revolves around the hundreds of folks who walked by ignoring a fellow human in distress. This was, at first, a mystery to me. As I have reflected on this fact of people not seeing a fellow human in distress, I have begun to wonder.... if I was on that street that day and I walked by him lying there, would I have stopped to help? Would I have even seen him? I hope that I would have at least called 911, but that hope is made in hindsight. Although homelessness is a very important societal issue for me, I also know a goodly part of my heart is hardened from 18 years of living in New York City. I know that I walk by homeless people all the time without seeing them. I know this is wrong, and yet I know that I still do this. So I do not know if I would have been one of those hundreds of oblivious people walking by that dying man. How do I transform myself so that I am not inured to the plight of such an individual?