Innocence is precious and powerful: not to be confused with ignorance, it is a Divine protection against the negative forces of life.We grow wise by stages and often a whole lifetime of experience is necessary to gain wisdom."Wisdom is glorious," said Solomon, "and never fadeth away."
Transfiguring experience is not granted to people as an easy and ready access to glory. Only in going up the mountain, rejecting and being rejected by the world, identifying with those who are most broken, does one encounter the divine refulgence...Our substitution of consumer tourism for pilgrimage, of canned experience for life-changing risk, is symptomatic of our inability to entertain in any way the reality of our own transfiguration.