Day 6: The Bush That Burned But Was Not Burnt Up
Shoonoyo/Dormition Fast: August 2026. The Feast of the Transfiguration
In the name of God the Father, Christ Jesus His Son and the Holy Spirit, One True God. Amen.
And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.
– Exodus 3:2
Today, in the midst of the Dormition Fast, the Church pauses to celebrate the glorious Feast of the Transfiguration.
This is no interruption of the fast. It is its heart.
For on Mount Tabor, the disciples behold the same mystery that Moses glimpsed in the wilderness: God revealing His glory without destroying those who draw near to Him.
To understand Tabor, we must first stand with Moses before the burning bush.
The Bush that Burned
Moses is forty years into an obscure life. He was no longer a prince, but a shepherd. He is minding another man’s sheep in a wilderness, having run from Egypt after killing a man, and there is no reason to expect anything of that afternoon at all. Then he sees a fire in a bush.
Fire in dry scrub is not remarkable. What is remarkable is that after a minute it is still there. The bush is not blackening. It is not collapsing into ash. Whatever is burning is not the wood.
And so Scripture records one of the most human sentences in the Old Testament. Moses says,
“I will turn aside now, and see this great sight.” – Exodus 3:3
He goes over for a closer look.
That decision changed everything. Not with a vision or a trance, but with a man deciding to walk across a bit of desert because something did not add up.
Faith often begins in that moment of willingness to stop, to turn aside, and to look more closely at the mystery of God.
The Flame in a Womb of Flesh
Our Fathers went straight to this, and they were entirely unembarrassed about it.
and how a womb of flesh
was able to carry the Flame,
and how the Flame dwelt
in a moist womb which did not get burnt up.
Just as the bush on Horeb bore
God in the flame,
so too did Mary bear
Christ in her virginity.
– Bride of Light, no. 46 (Verse Homily on the Virgin Mary, 2), lines 9 to 16.
A womb of flesh, carrying Flame. The image is breath taking.
The bush remained a bush, and the Virgin remained fully human, yet both became dwelling places of the living God.
Notice the poet is not saying that the bush reminds him of her. He is saying that these are one event, shown twice. God came to dwell in a created thing, and the created thing was not destroyed by Him.
There is a hymn in this collection which makes the point in a way I find almost unbearable. It is a dialogue between Gabriel and the Virgin, and she is frightened of him.
You are made of flame, do not frighten me;
you are wrapped in coals of fire, do not terrify me.
O fiery one, ow should I believe you,
when all that you have spoken to me is totally new?
– Bride of Light, no. 41, verse 16.
She is afraid of the messenger, because the messenger is burning.
And yet, a few months later, she cradles in her arms the One whom even the angels worship. Another poet sings:
He was Fire in the virgin’s womb,
yet she was not burnt up by His flames.
Lovingly she embraced the Burning Coal,
yet she suffered no harm as she held Him in honour.
Burning Fire has become embodied
and is clasped by Mary’s hands! –
– Bride of Light, no. 23 (Soghitha 2), verses 2 to 3.
Notice the change. She who was initially afraid of the angel’s fire, she ended up holding the Fire the angel was made of.
What changed?
What changed is not the Fire. The mystery is not that the bush or the young Mary possessed some hidden strength, but that the Fire revealed His gentleness.
The God who called worlds into being knows how to draw near without destroying what He loves. Love does not overwhelm; rather, love makes communion possible.
And in another hymn the poet lets her explain how she survived it. She is speaking to her Son.
Like Mount Sinai, I received You
and was not burnt up by Your awesome Fire,
for You hid away Your Fire
lest it harm me,
and Your flame, upon which the Seraphs are unable to gaze,
did not burn me up.
– Bride of Light, no. 22 (Soghitha 1), verse 4.
Read the reason she gives, because it is not the one we would have given for her.
She does not say she was strong enough. She does not say she was pure enough to withstand Him, and the Church calls her all-holy and means it.
She says: You hid away Your Fire lest it harm me.
The bush was not fireproof. The bush survived because the Fire chose to be gentle with it.
That is the difference between our God and every other power that has ever been worshipped. His restraint is not weakness and it is not distance. It is love working out how to come close without destroying what it loves.
The Mountain
Now to the mountain, because our Syriac Fathers get there before us.
Blessed are you, Mary, who became
the type of the bush which Moses beheld;
blessed are you, Mary, who became
like a veil, covering His radiance;
blessed are you, Mary, for from you there has shone forth
the single Ray which hid the Sun’s light:
of old it flashed out over Moses at the top of the mountain,
but today, all the ends of the earth are filled with it.
– Bride of Light, no. 21 (Hymns on Mary, no. 16), verse 3.
There are three things named there, and it is worth taking them slowly, because the poet has put a great deal into very little space.
She is the bush, which held the Fire and was not harmed.
She is the veil, which covers a radiance nobody could otherwise stand near.
And she is the one from whom the Ray shone out, the same Ray that once flashed over Moses on the mountain top, and which now fills the ends of the earth.
Hold on to the second of those, because it is the tender one, and we pass over it too quickly.
Moses had asked to see the glory of God. It was not presumption. It was longing, from a man who had already spoken with God as a friend speaks, and who wanted to see the face of the One he was speaking to. Any of us who have prayed for years would recognise that longing.
And the answer was no. You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live. (Exodus 33:20)
Read that as the refusal it looks like and it sounds cold. Read it again and it is not a refusal at all. It is a father moving a lamp out of a child’s reach. The problem was never that God did not want to be seen. The problem was what the sight would do to the one who saw it.
So God does something else instead. He puts Moses in a cleft of the rock, covers him with His hand until the glory has passed by, and lets him see what remains after.
That is mercy, dressed as a disappointment.
And this is exactly what our Fathers see happening again, on a far greater scale, when God takes flesh. One of the poets sets the two moments side by side. He is not looking at Tabor when he writes this; he is looking at the manger at Bethlehem. But the point he makes is the point of today.
Moses wished to see His glory
but was unable to see Him as he wished;
let us come and see Him today
as He lies in the manger in swaddling clothes.
Formerly there was none who dared
to see God and still live,
but today all who have seen Him
are saved from second death.
– Bride of Light, no. 46 (Verse Homily on the Virgin Mary, 2), lines 35 to 42.
Notice what the poet is claiming, because it is bolder than it first sounds.
He is not saying that we have been given permission at last, as though the rule had been relaxed. He is saying the terms have changed. Once, to see God was to die. Now, to see Him is the thing that saves us from dying.
What changed was not God’s glory. What changed is that it came to us wrapped in something we could stand near.
And here the veil comes back.
Remember what happened to Moses after Sinai. He came down the mountain having spoken with God, and his own face was shining so fiercely that the people could not look at him, and he covered it with a cloth. Not to hide God. To make himself bearable to his own brothers.
Moses had borrowed that light. He caught it the way a wall catches sunlight, and it faded, and while it lasted he had to keep it covered.
Now hold that beside what the poet called her. She is the veil covering His radiance.
Moses veiled his face so that we could come near him. God took flesh from her so that we could come near Him. The same mercy, working the same way, on a scale we can hardly take in. The covering is not concealment. It is how the Light gets close enough to warm us instead of destroying us.
And then, on Tabor, the two things meet.
Moses is standing on that mountain. The man who asked to see the glory and was told he could not. The man who hid his face at the bush, who was shut in a cleft of rock, who came down from Sinai with a cloth over his own skin because even the reflection was too much.
He is standing in the open, in the full light, and nobody is telling him to look away.
The Fathers I have quoted today were not writing about Tabor, and I do not want to put words in their mouths. But the thread they hand us runs straight to it. On Horeb, Moses saw the Fire in a bush and hid his face. On Sinai, he asked to see the Face and was covered by God’s own hand. On Tabor, he sees, and lives, and speaks.
What he is looking at is a body.
And that body came from her.
The Bush Is Not The Point
Nobody has ever written a hymn about the shrubbery of Sinai.
That bush was a thorn bush in a dry place, one of thousands. There was nothing about it worth crossing a field for. It is remembered for one reason only, which is that God was in it and it was not destroyed.
Take the fire out and there is nothing left. Not a lesser story. No story at all.
And the same is true of Tabor. Peter, James and John did not climb that mountain to see a mountain. What they saw was not the place shining. It was Him.
So when our Fathers call her the Bush, they are not admiring her. They are telling us what she held, and what held her together while she held it.
She is the bush. He is the fire.
Every title given to her ultimately leads us to Him.
What This Means For Us
Look at what the Fire does not do.
It does not consume the bush. It does not replace the bush with something better. It does not turn the bush into fire, or make the bush stop being a bush.
The thorn bush is still a thorn bush. Same dry ground, same roots, same thorns. Entirely itself, and entirely full of God.
That is what our Fathers mean when they speak of a creature becoming a partaker of the divine nature. Not that we are absorbed and lost. Not that we are burnt away and something better put in our place. Not that we stop being the ordinary, awkward, unpromising people we have always been.
We are filled, and we are not consumed.
I think there is a fear underneath a good deal of our religion, and I suspect it sits under our fasting more often than we would admit.
It is the fear that if God ever really came close, there would be nothing left of us.
That holiness is a kind of subtraction. That the saints got there by disappearing, and that the nearer we get to God the less of us there will be, until whatever it is that makes us ourselves has been quietly taken away and we are left agreeing with everything and feeling nothing.
If you have ever thought that, you are in good company, and you are wrong, and the bush is the proof.
Moses did not find a heap of ash on Horeb with a voice coming out of it.
He found a bush. Intact. Alight.
And there is one more thing worth saying today, gently, because it is the reason this Feast is kept at all.
Our Lord did not become radiant on that mountain. He had always been radiant. Nothing whatever happened to Him on Tabor.
What happened is that three tired, frightened, ordinary men were briefly made able to see what had been in front of them the whole time.
The change was in them.
That is what the fasting is for. Not to make ourselves smaller. Not to apologise for having a body. Not to earn anything, because none of it is for sale. We are being made able to bear what is already being given to us.
So let today be simple.
Somewhere in this day there will be a moment when God is nearer than we notice: a person we would rather avoid, a duty we would rather put down, a silence we would rather fill. Turn aside and look at it. That is all Moses did. He crossed a bit of desert because something did not add up, and God spoke only after he had turned.
We are nine days from the feast. There is time.
And when we come to the Qurbono this week and the Body of Christ is placed into our open mouths, remember what we are holding. The Seraphim cannot look at that Fire. Our lips close around it, and we are not harmed, for the same reason the bush was not harmed and she was not harmed.
Not because we are strong enough.
Because He hides His Fire, lest it harm us.
Blessed is He who came down and dwelt in a body, so that we might see Him and live.
I end with the Manitho sung during the intercession to the Blessed Theotokos, which our Church has been singing about this day all along.
Peace, O ground sown without seed,
Bush set aflame, but not burned.
Your brother in Christ
Jobin
Tomorrow – Day 7: A rock in a desert, struck with a stick, and water coming out of it. We leave the mountain and go back to the wilderness, where the people are thirsty and complaining, which is to say, where we usually are.
