Transfiguration
Last Sunday before Lent, 2026 Readings Exodus 24.12-18 Ps 2 Matthew 17.1-9 In the 1979 movie, A Picnic at Hanging Rock , a group of schoolgirls with their lady teachers all dressed up in dreamy period costumes disappear on a school outing on Valentine’s Day 1900. It’s a powerful and timeless movie, with its finely balanced portrayal of the tensions and unspoken understandings between the characters, the hints of impropriety, special friendships and hostilities; contradictions sharpened by the awkward imagery of pretty crinoline dresses clambering up a granite outcrop in the middle of the Victorian Alps, claustrophobic scenes of lost girls clawing through spiky undergrowth - and pervading the movie the dizzying emptiness of the Australian bush. I guess the brooding uneasiness of the movie mirrors the ambivalence and barely suppressed fear of the Australian bush felt by early white settlers. We get the sense that the mountain itself is protecting some sort of secre...