There are people I wish I could speak with, even now—especially now. Not for advice, or congratulations, but for conversation. For the rhythm and spark of real dialogue. I find myself thinking about Fr. Steve Wilson today—more sharply, more tenderly—because it’s August 7, and that means I’ve appeared again in The Musings of a Simple Country Priest, his posthumously published devotional. A brief mention. A Holden Caulfield reference. But it’s more than that. It’s an echo of a voice I still miss.
As I near the close of my doctoral journey, his absence feels heavier. I wish I could sit across from him and talk about books, about teaching, about how belief and doubt sometimes live in the same house. Fr. Steve was a priest, yes, but he never insisted that I become something I wasn’t. He gave me space to ask, to wrestle, to think. That was his real gift. He engaged me as a fellow intellect, never a project to be fixed.
His devotional for today begins with three words that now feel deeply personal: “Listen up. This is more than you think.” That line could have been a text message. A sermon. A dare. And in some ways, it is all three. He ties together my casual Facebook comment about Holden Caulfield with the Gospel story of the Transfiguration, reminding readers—and me—that most of us miss what's in front of us. That “we look for the expedient, the convenient, the entertaining, the obvious... and in the process, we miss the Truth, which is staring us in the face.”
His voice builds as it always did, quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins:
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.”
And just like that, Hopkins lives again—not as an abstract Victorian priest-poet, but as a lens for everyday glory: cicadas emerging, a neighbor’s dirt-caked hands, the warmth of an unexpected hug. Fr. Steve believed in wonder. Not because it was fashionable, but because it was true. And because, like the apostles on the mountain, we are always in danger of falling asleep to the divine in our midst.
That mountain—Luke 9:28–36—is where the Gospel places the Transfiguration. A moment where Jesus, praying alone, suddenly radiates light. His clothes “dazzling white.” His face changed. Moses and Elijah appear. The disciples wake to something glorious and overwhelming, and Peter, true to form, babbles nonsense about building tents. But the cloud intervenes, saying only:
“This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” (Luke 9:35)
No monuments. No conclusions. Just a command to pay attention.
Raphael's painting of the Transfiguration—his final work, left incomplete at his death—captures this tension perfectly. It is, famously, a painting in two registers. Above: glory, weightless and serene. Jesus floats in radiant white, flanked by the prophets. Below: chaos. A demon-possessed boy writhes, a crowd pleads, apostles argue. The divine does not cancel out the human; it simply hovers above it. Both realms are real. Both are part of the story.
In a way, Fr. Steve’s devotional feels like that painting. The upper register is his theology: clear, luminous, poetic. The lower register is me—reading his words years after his death, longing for the sound of his voice, questioning what I ever meant to him. Did our conversations linger for him the way they still echo for me? Was I just a parishioner with clever things to say, or was I something more?
2 Peter 1:16–18 reflects on the Transfiguration as remembered by one who saw it:
“We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain.”
Even this is secondhand. Memory filtered through years, reshaped by grief and need. That feels familiar. I didn’t witness Fr. Steve’s last days. I stayed away, unsure of my place. But I return, again and again, to the devotional. To his words. To the holy mountain where his voice still speaks.
Exodus 34:29–35 tells how Moses came down from Mount Sinai, not knowing that “the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.” He had to veil his face. He didn’t see the glow. Others did.
And that’s how it feels now. Fr. Steve will never know how much he shaped me, not just as a thinker, but as a person who keeps trying to stay awake. To see. To listen.
“Most people don’t see anything,” he wrote.
“Don’t be most people. Listen up. This is more than you think.”
Maybe this is the real miracle: that a brief mention in a devotional book can feel like a reunion. That a line of poetry, a gospel story, a final painting can help me find myself again on the mountain—confused, yes, but awake.
Not everything shines with the same light. But if we’re lucky, we glimpse the truth—reflected, unfinished, glorious still.