The 2022 Oscar Best Picture winner Coda tells the story of Ruby Rossi, the 17-year-old hearing daughter of deaf parents. Before going to school each morning, Ruby is up at 3 a.m. to work with her dad and brother on the family’s fishing boat off the coast of Gloucester, Mass. As the only hearing person in her family, she’s been the family’s interpreter and go-between with the “hearing” world since she was a child. She’s been the ears and voice of her family in every possible situation — some serious, some hilarious, some crudely embarrassing. Ruby often finds herself in the role of parent, explaining and protecting her mom and dad and brother from a world they struggle to navigate.

Ruby can sing — beautifully. Every morning, while hauling nets in the open ocean air, she sings. Music is her joy — a joy that is lost on her family, who are mystified — and a little hurt — by her interest in an avocation they can’t possibly appreciate.  “If I was blind, would you want to paint?” her mother asks Ruby at one point.

At the beginning of her senior year, Ruby works up the courage to audition for the school choir. Despite a disastrous start, the choir director realizes her talent and a new chapter opens up in Ruby’s life.  Soon she is offered a scholarship to Boston’s Berklee College of Music.

But her family’s fishing business hits a rough patch and they desperately need Ruby’s help. Suddenly a life she never imagined becomes possible for Ruby — and, just as suddenly, Mom and Dad have to face the reality of making their way through the “hearing” world without their daughter.

Every family can identify with the difficult balancing of dreams and needs, of possibilities and obstacles that Ruby and her family struggle to achieve. But their selfless love for one another enables them to move on: Ruby understands her parents’ fear of being without her and works with them to develop long overdue working relationships with the Gloucester fishing community — and, in the film’s climactic scene, Mom Jackie and Dad Frank come to “see” (if not “hear”) the joy their daughter’s singing brings to her and those who hear her. The Rossis come to realize that it’s not their deafness that defines them but their generosity of heart that makes them who they are and establishes their place in the world.

Coda is a story of transfiguration on two levels: Ruby manages to put aside her fears and doubts to realize the gift of song that God has instilled in her. It’s also a story of realizing God’s call to each of us to become what the late Desmond Tutu called “agents of transfiguration”: the means for others to realize the goodness and beauty within them. Sometimes that requires putting our own “transfiguring” dreams and hopes aside for the sake of another. Love that calls us beyond ourselves is transforming. In the transforming love of Christ the Messiah-Servant, we can “transfigure” despair into hope, sadness into joy, anguish into healing, estrangement into community. Archbishop Tutu has said that the work of “transfiguration . . . [is to] work with God so that injustice is transfigured into justice, so that there will be more compassion and caring, so that there will be more laughter and joy, so that there will be more togetherness in God’s world.”