Stabat Mater: An Introduction

As the end of Lent draws near, it is a good time to gather on a Sunday afternoon in this church, this place built, set apart, and used for the worship of God- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit- to enter together into a prayer. The word “oratorio” has come to have almost an exclusively secular meaning, referring to a certain type of musical composition. While oratorios typically take up religious themes, though not always, I think it bears noting this afternoon that oratio is the Latin word for prayer.

Stabat Mater is short for Stabat Mater dolorosa. Translated from Latin this phrase means- “The sorrowful Mother was standing.” Who is this mother? Where is she standing? And why is she full of sorrow?

The mother is the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, our Blessed Mother. She is standing beneath her Son as he hangs on the cross. This is why she is sorrowful. It is fundamental to Christian belief and for Christian practice that Christ truly died on the cross. His death was real death, not and illusion or mere appearance. We must reject the docetic heresy that our Lord only seemed to die.

If you look at the south, west, and north walls of the church, you will see the Stations of the Cross. Indeed, virtually every Catholic church is adorned with its own Stations. While this is devotion can be done at any time, during Lent the Stations of the Cross is supercharged. Gathering together on Fridays of this sacred season, the day of our Lord's Passion, the community walks these Stations together. It is a tremendously effective way of bearing our own crosses and helping others bear theirs.

Exactly who originally composed the words of the Stabat Mater is something of a mystery. For a long time, it was believed that it was composed by the Franciscan friar Jacopone da Todi, who died 1306 or even by Pope Innocent III, who died ninety years earlier. Both these theories have largely been discredited. There are certainly available any number of in-depth studies on the history of this text in various languages.

The earliest copies of the text of the Stabat Mater we possess are found in a thirteenth century Gradual, or prayerbook, used by a convent of Dominican nuns in Bologna, Italy. We know that by the end of the fourteenth century the Stabat Mater was in wide use throughout the Church.

Giovanni Pergolesi’s musical setting of the text of the Stabat Mater, which he completed in 1736, remains the most popular of the several extant musical compositions of this beautiful meditation on the Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The beauty and depth of Pergolesi’s composition, I believe, is attributable, at least in part, to the fact that he composed it during the final weeks of his life. He died, aged 26, in March 1736 from tuberculosis. There can be little doubt of the very personal nature of his musical masterwork.

The Stabat Mater was so widely used that over the course of a few centuries it began appearing in Missals of various Latin Rites that existed prior to the Council of Trent. Specifically, the Stabat Mater was used as a sequence for the Feast of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the sixteenth century, the Council of Trent suppressed this, and many other lengthy sequences, from the Roman Missal. It was restored to the Roman Missal as a sequence by Pope Benedict XIII in 1727.

With the Second Vatican Council’s reform of the liturgy and of the Church’s liturgical calendar, which features far fewer sequences, not to mention fewer feasts of Our Lady, the Stabat Mater, while suitable for liturgical and devotional use, is no longer part of the Church’s official liturgy. Until its revision after the Second Vatican in the late 1960s, the Stabat Mater was printed in the Breviary for devotional use by the clergy.

This afternoon, the Stabat Mater will be performed in its original Latin. But looking at the first English translation, made by the Anglican priest Edward Caswall in the mid-nineteenth century, who, instead of an awkwardly literal translation of the kind to which we’ve grown far too accustomed today, his dynamic translation preserves the rhyming scheme of the Latin original. Using Caswall’s translation, this beautiful oratorio begins:

At the Cross her station keeping,
Stood the mournful Mother weeping,
Close to Jesus to the last…

The whole oratorio is a prayer to Christ through the Blessed Virgin. To Jesus through Mary is a most expedient passage. So, in addition to reciting the first stanza of the Stabat Mater, it seems fitting to also recite its next-to-last stanza as a nice way to end my introduction and to frame what we are about to hear. In the penultimate stanza we hear:

Christ, when Thou shalt call me hence,
Be Thy Mother my defence,
Be Thy Cross my victory

Die again. Die better.

Reading: Ezk 37:12-14; Ps 130:1-8; Rom 8:8-11; John 11:1-15

There is something in today's very long Gospel reading that is easy to miss. It's something I noticed a few years ago. So now, it jumps out at me each time I read it. This something happens in the middle of the drama of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. This something is said by Thomas, the same Thomas who refuses to believe in the resurrection lest he not only see but feel and touch the Risen Lord's wounds.

What Thomas says after Jesus tells his disciples (in John's Gospel there are no apostles, only disciples) they are going to back to Judea, thus overriding their concerns about Jesus' and likely their own safety: "Let us also go to die with him." It is important to notice that, in our Gospel passage, Thomas makes reference only to dying, not to rising. Jesus' own dying is very present in this passage. I think especially here in the United States, we long for a Christianity sans the cross. Christianity without the cross is something other than Christianity.

Who is the "him" to whom Thomas refers? Is it Lazarus? Is it Jesus? It may be a reference to the previous observation that Jesus left Judea because he was in danger of being stoned to death, an intimation of what awaits him on his return south. Or perhaps Thomas is referring to Lazarus' death. It isn't important to resolve this ambiguity because Lazarus will, presumably, die again and, moreover, Jesus is going to die, really die, not only seem to die, as some docetic accounts, like the one in Qu'ran, understand it (see Surah 4:157).

Not exactly a denial of death, but a desired denial or at least deferral of death is present in this reading. Martha and then Mary rebuke Jesus, telling him that if he'd bothered to come as soon as he heard of Lazarus' condition he could've and, they presume, would've spared him death. What Jesus is trying to teach both his befuddled closest disciples as well as Mary and Martha is the necessity of dying in order to really live.

Our persistent dualism, which is gnostic (i.e., very human), is a big reason why we either deny the body or, as tends to be more often the case, diminish it. We seem to prefer, like good Platonists, the exaltation of some inchoate spirit over and against brute materiality. In our reading from the apostle's Letter to the Romans, when we read or hear the word "flesh," it is not just important but vital to grasp that Paul here is not referring to the body.

Lazarus! Come Out! by Tony O’Connell

In Koine Greek the word we translate as "body" is soma. In this passage, Saint Paul uses sarki, the appropriate form of the noun sarx, which comes into the New Testament in English as "flesh." Far from referring to the soft tissue attached to our bones, sarx in the New Testament refers to our "animal" nature, our instinctive drives and reactions- those things contrary to the fruits of God's Spirit. In verses 10-11 of our reading from Romans the body, soma is evoked. Sarx brings death to the soma and God's Spirit gives the body life.

Once again, love, agape, is the operative term. Jesus loved Lazarus. It was nothing but the power of his love that restored Lazarus to life. Sarx brings death. God's Spirit brings life. Jesus doesn't just talk a lot of waffle about dying to live and yadda, yadda. He undertakes this passage himself, out of love for you, an even higher love than he exhibits for Lazarus in this pericope.

Could it be that Thomas, like us, knows what it is to die but not to really live? Like Jesus's closest disciples, we don't fully grasp what it is to rise, or even to die. To employ a familiar cliché, we seem to revel in putting the cart (rising) before the horse (dying). What it means to truly die is not merely, or even really, accepting a biological given. We must resist the temptation of wanting to rise without first dying, lest our perceived rising bypasses death and is only a short-lived resusitcation, not resurrection.

What about Lazarus? Do you think after being brought back from the dead he lived life differently? Presumably, Lazarus would go on to die again. Did he die better?

Today's Collect is a nearly perfect summary of today's readings in the reality it expresses:

By your help, we beseech you, Lord our God,
may we walk eagerly in that same charity
with which, out of love for the world,
your Son handed himself over to death

Solemnity of Saint Joseph

Readings: 2 Sam 7-4-5a.12-14a.16; Ps 89:2-5.27.29; Rom 4:13.16-18.22; Matt 1:16.18-21.24a

Joseph “was a righteous man.”¹ What more needs to be said about him? How was his righteousness demonstrated? By his unwillingness to expose his betrothed to shame. What shame was he worried about being exposed? The shame of being pregnant with a child he knew wasn’t his. Rather than subject her to shame, maybe even to death as an adulteress, upon learning of her pregnancy, he decided to quietly cut ties with her. In his context, his decision was very merciful.

Another way Joseph’s righteousness is expressed is by his non-expression. Joseph never speaks a word in either Matthew’s or Luke’s Gospel. He seems intent to listen, to observe, and to act. According to the scriptures, he is a quiet man, a deeply good man. When it comes to God, a very obedient man.

After listening to the angel in his dream in today’s Gospel, he did what the angel told him to do, which was to go through with his marriage to Mary by taking her into his home. In the next chapter of Matthew, at the command of the angel, he took his family and fled to Egypt. He did this to avoid Herod’s jealous massacre of all the male infants in Bethlehem. According to Matthew’s narrative, after Herod’s death, Joseph did not bring his family back to Israel until he was prompted to do so by the angel of the Lord.

All of this, I think, gives a lesson about spiritual life. Namely, prayer is not having a one-way conversation with God. It is about listening to God. To listen, we must learn how to hear the Lord’s voice so that we know it is him we are listening to. This is called discernment. Not every thought that occurs to us while praying comes from God.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola, in his Spiritual Exercises, gives us a way to discern the many forces that act upon us, even in, perhaps particularly in, the spiritual life. It is important to understand what is from God and what is not from God. This is yet another aspect of Joseph’s righteousness: his ability to discern the voice of God and his fortitude in carrying out God’s will, no matter what it is, even if it is packing up his family on a moment’s notice and moving to another country.

Joseph shows holiness in the ordinary circumstances of life. He shows us what it means, and what it looks like, to discern and then do God’s will. Hence, Saint Joseph is the Patron Saint of fathers, of immigrants, of the Universal Church, workers, and of a happy death. According to the Litany of Saint Joseph, he is, among other things, the hope of the sick, terror of demons, a mirror of patience, and model of workers.

Pope Francis dedicated the year from 8 December 2020 to 8 December 2021 (8 December being the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception) as the Year of Saint Joseph. This marked the 150th anniversary of Pope Pius IX’s designation of Saint Joseph as Patron of the Church. Since he was the guardian, the protector, and the earthly father of our Lord, it makes sense that he is the Guardian of the Church Universal.

As Pope Francis noted in his 2020 Apostolic Letter about him, “St. Joseph reminds us that those who appear hidden or in the shadows can play an incomparable role in the history of salvation.”²

It is through Joseph that Jesus is a member of the House of David. Bethlehem, as we heard in our first reading yesterday, is King David’s native place. It was to Bethlehem that Joseph went to be enrolled for the Roman census because he was of David’s lineage.

Finally, Joseph is often called “most chaste.” Calling the spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as Pope Francis noted, “is not simply a sign of affection.”³ Neither is it to merely reference his continent relationship to his wife. It is, as the Holy Father points out,

the summation of an attitude that is the opposite of possessiveness. Chastity is freedom from possessiveness in every sphere of one’s life. Only when love is chaste, is it truly love. A possessive love ultimately becomes dangerous: it imprisons, constricts and makes for misery. God himself loved humanity with a chaste love; he left us free even to go astray and set ourselves against him. The logic of love is always the logic of freedom, and Joseph knew how to love with extraordinary freedom ⁴

This is quite a radical departure from how most of us learned about chastity. To be chaste does not fundamentally or mainly consist of saying “No” to this or that. In its essence, the virtue of chastity is to say “Yes”! Saint Joseph shows us that true freedom is not freedom from but freedom for. What freedom is for, ultimately, is to say “Yes” to God and to be a person for others. Freedom is fully realized in love, in self-giving, self-sacrificing love. Saint Joseph stands as a great model of how love of God leads theo-logically to love of neighbor.

St. Joseph, pray for us
Most just, pray for us
Most chaste, pray for us
Glory of family life, pray for us
Most prudent, pray for us
Mirror of patience, pray for us
Model of workers, pray for us
Hope of the sick, pray for us
Patron of exiles, pray for us
Terror of demons, pray for us
Protector of Holy Church, pray for us

---

1 Matthew 1:19.^↩
2 Pope Francis. Apostolic Letter “With a Father’s Heart” [Patris Corde], Introduction.^↩
3 Patris Corde, sec. 7^↩
4 Ibid.^↩

Year A Fourth Sunday of Lent

Readings: 1 Sam 16:1b.6-7.10-13a;- Ps 23:1-6; Eph 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

Looking at Samuel's response to the LORD's prompting to head to Bethlehem to the house of Jesse to find and anoint Israel's new king in our first reading, we see that it was only after Samuel considered six of Jesse's seven sons that he found God's anointed in the seventh. Through the prophet, God, in characteristic fashion, chose the least among them even though, biblically speaking, seven is the number of completeness.

This was necessitated by the dramatic flameout of Israel’s first king, Saul, who, predictably, disobeyed God. Keep in mind that God acceded to Israel’s demand for a king because of the hardness of their hearts. In agreeing to anoint a king, God said to his prophet, Samuel, “You are not the one they are rejecting. They are rejecting me as their king.”¹

This episode dramatically highlights the fact that God often (as in almost always) chooses the least likely person to accomplish his purposes. Of course, Jesus himself is the ultimate proof of this divine tendency. Why does God work this way? I think it's so that there is no doubt that it is God who accomplishes his work of creation and redemption. These are not two works, but one. Together these constitute the opus Dei, the work of God. While God wants us to join his work, it is God’s work and it will be accomplished with or without us- as Saul discovered.

You don't have to take my word to verify that God chooses the least likely people to accomplish his purposes, or even that of Sacred Scripture, just look around, not only at the Elect but at the rest of us. Don’t limit your view to those in the pews, but up here in front too. It’s easy to see what Paul wrote about and to the Church in ancient Corinth:

consider your own calling... Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God. It is due to him that you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, as well as righteousness, sanctification, and redemption ²

Going all the way back to father Abraham, the people of God have always been a motley crew. According to the upside-down nature of God's Kingdom, being the least and lowly is the surest sign of election.

[11:30 AM MASS- My dear Tatiana, Don. and George you have been called by the Lord from darkness to live in the glory of his magnificent light, which illumines you from within and is the very power of the Holy Spirit. It is by means of the Holy Spirit that our risen Lord remains present, not just to us, but in and through us until he comes again. And so, heed the apostle's exhortation: “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”³ ]

It has been observed that “original sin is the one verifiable Christian dogma.”⁴ Accordingly, in the most real sense, we are all born blind. Like the man Jesus heals by restoring his sight in today’s Gospel, there is a scriptural sense in which our blindness is not necessarily the result of either our sin or that of our parents. In his Letter to the Romans Saint Paul observed:

creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God⁵

This is wonderfully and gloriously sung about at the beginning of the upcoming Easter Vigil in that great and ancient hymn, the Exsultet:

O happy fault,
   that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer!⁶

My dear friends, through baptism and confirmation, Christ elects you. Like the blind man in today's Gospel, you are chosen so “that the works of God might be made visible through [you].”⁷ Your chosen-ness, like David's, is a mystery. You are chosen to bear witness to others about what Jesus has done for you and to invite them to meet the Savior that they, too, might see.

What can be frustrating about this, as Saint Paul discovered, is that Christ’s “power is made perfect in weakness.”⁸ Therefore, as his followers, you need to learn to gladly boast of your weaknesses. This is how the power of Christ can dwell in you. As Jesus said to those who boasted of their own strength, their own perceived righteousness, which we call self-righteousness: “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do.”⁹ Of course, the hallmark of self-righteousness is judging others.

Upon gaining spiritual sight, like the man in our Gospel, you see Jesus, who is the mercy of God. God’s mercy is the healing balm for what ails us. Experience of God’s mercy is what enables you both to see and then boast of your own weakness.

Christ’s healing mercy, often called grace, is given to us powerfully through the sacraments. Saint Ignatius of Antioch called the Eucharist “the medicine of immortality.”¹⁰ Fear of death is at the core of so much human dysfunction, the source of our existential angst. The Christian is the one who has experienced in and through Christ that love is stronger than death. Christ is resurrected because God is love. As a Christian, resurrection is more than just a belief in an event that happened a long time ago. Resurrection is what you live.

For Jesus, it is never what physically ails a person that is most in need of his healing touch. Rather, it is what ails one spiritually, in the very depths of your being, that he longs to heal. The most observable effect of this disease is the inability to love as Jesus loves. Overcoming this inability, this lack of grace, is a process, the process of conversion. To love as Jesus loves takes incredible strength, one might say a supernatural strength. As the late, great Rich Mullins sang: "It's hard to be like Jesus."¹¹

The blind man in our Gospel exemplifies the person who is enlightened by her/his initial encounter with Jesus. And who, only after experiencing trials, develops “a much more profound faith.”¹² It is by sticking with Jesus through life’s ups and downs that you come not only to see him evermore clearly but to become more Christlike. Eugene Peterson, it seems to me, was correct when he insisted that following Jesus is “a long obedience in the same direction.”¹³

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1 1 Samuel 8:7.^↩
2 1 Corinthians 1:26-27.^↩
3 Ephesians 5:14.^↩
4 James Martin, S.J. Jesus: A Pilgrimage, 100.^↩
5 Romans 8:20-21.^↩
6 Roman Missal, “The Easter Vigil in the Holy Night,” sec. 19.^↩
7 John 9:3.^↩
8 2 Corinthians 12:9.^↩
9 Matthew 9:12.^↩
10 Saint Ignatius of Antioch. Letter to the Ephesians 20:2.^↩
11 Rich Mullins. "Hard."^↩
12 Raymond E. Brown. An Introduction to the New Testament, 348.^↩
13 Eugene Peterson. A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society.^↩

Living water

Something quite different this week:

In a rock,
   hanging on a tree,
      places where the well of life can't possibly be.
Only by faith can you drink from the fount of grace.

Watered by love, hope grow and stands
   on life's ever-sifting sands.

"My portion is God... I will hope in him"

As previously mentioned, I am reading following a program to read the Bible in a year. Which program, you might ask? This one. Apart from the fact that it includes what we Catholics call the deuterocanonical books, there is nothing special about it. I also don't mind sharing that I am using the Jerusalem Bible, a translation I like very much and one I haven't used in far too long. I didn't start right on New Year's Day. Thus far, I have read Genesis, Job, Exodus, and Leviticus. I am currently about two-thirds of the way through the Book of Numbers.

I bring this up not brag. After all, committing to read about three chapters of scripture a day isn't really that big a deal. I bring it up to point out something that people who read the Bible regularly discover over and over. What we discover is that every time you read a passage or a book of the Bible, you discover something that you previously overlooked and you make connections you did not previously make.

Today I experienced the latter: making a connection I have not previously made. The particular verse that served as my prompt was Numbers 18:20. Referring to the Levites, the descendants of Aaron, Israel's priestly tribe, God told Aaron:

You shall have no inheritance in their land, no portion of it among them shall be yours. It is I who will be your portion and your inheritance among the sons of Israel

It is the last sentence that struck me today.

The connection I made was to 1 Peter 2:9-10:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people set apart to sing the praises of God who called you of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you not a people at all and now you are the People of God; once you were outside the mercy and now you have been given mercy (Jerusalem Bible- italics in the original)

Indeed, when one considers baptism and confirmation, we explicitly believe, as per the rites, that one so initiated is priest, prophet, and royalty. You see, the priesthood of all the baptized is not some new-fangled idea thought up in the heat of the Reformation. It is a genuine recovery and understanding of the genuinely sacramental nature of these sacred rites.

According to Nicholas Afanasiev, an Orthodox theologian whose work exerted an ennormous influence on the Second Vatican Council, because of confirmation, there are no unordained members of the Church. In English, this prompts a neologism: laics. This term is to go alongside clerics.

While this may be a bit of a digression, I feel inclined to share that yesterday I listened to a conversation between Russell Moore and Rick Warren. A good part of their conversation was dedicated to the Southern Baptist Convention's decision to kick out Saddle Back Church, founded by Warren in 1980. Warren then served as senior pastor there for 43 years.

What led the Southern Baptist Convention to "disaffiliate" Saddle Back was the decision of that body of believers to lay hands on and give the title of "pastor" to women who serve that community in various ways. Even so, the role of lead or senior pastor is still reserved for men. I was utterly fascinated by Warren's explanation of both the decision to include women as "clerics" (though I think Baptists would not use that term) as well as his decision to appeal Saddle Back's disaffiliation at the Southern Baptists' summer convention.

What I found most convincing was Warren's assertion, rooted in scripture- though there is an exegetical question I'd like to ask him about his interpretation of the Great Commission in Matthew 28- was that the Church cannot fulfill Jesus' command to go, make disciples, teach, and baptize with one hand tied behind our back. The one hand that is tied is not fully availing the Church and the world of the gifts of women.

But here is the real connection, rooted in the juxtaposition of the verse from Numbers with the two verses for 1 Peter: because we are a priestly people, it is the Lord who is our inheritance. Therefore, we do not seek the land, or a land. It strikes me as pretty good case against not only Christian nationalism but all forms of Christian dominionism. Is this to say that Christians should disengage, refusing to be full-fledged citizens of the nations in which we live? No!

Saint Justin Martyr's First Apology still serves as a very good exposition on how Christians are to live in the world. In Chapter IX of this work, addressed to the Roman emperor, Justin wrote: "And when you hear that we look for a kingdom, you suppose, without making any inquiry, that we speak of a human kingdom; whereas we speak of that which is with God, as appears also from the confession of their faith made by those who are charged with being Christians... For if we looked for a human kingdom, we should also deny our Christ, that we might not be slain; and we should strive to escape detection, that we might obtain what we expect."

Whether you like Pope Benedict XVI or not, in his first encyclical, Deus Cartias Est, he did a wonderful job of explaining how easy it is to reduce the Gospel in this way and why it is important not to do it.

Someone I follow on Twitter has been piecing together a case for her thesis that both Christian Nationalists and those who seek to politicize the Gospel in the opposite direction are engaging in different forms of Christian dominionism. In other words, people who assert that being a Christian boils down to holding the "correct" political opinions seek to turn the Gospel into something exclusively this-worldly. Even when stated in such a general and unspecific way, given the divisions among Christians, it seems clear that this is a thesis worth exploring.

As a Catholic, I align myself with Catholic Social Teaching. This makes for political difficulties because it is easy to see that neither party is in harmony with convinctions that arise from the magisterium's modern social teaching that started with Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and finds its most recent expression in Pope Francis' Fratelli Tutti. Politically, I think Christians should be baffling to non-Christians on both the right and the left.

I end by invoking another scriptural verse: "My portion is [God]," says my soul, "and so I will hope in him" (Lamentations 3:24- Jerusalem Bible)

Transfigured to carry out "the new law of love"

Readings: Gen 12:1-4a; Ps 33:4-5.18-20.22; 2 Tim 1:8b-10; Matt 17:1-9

This is more of a sketch than a reflection on today's scripture readings. Unlike Ordinary Time, during Lent, there is an intent in the lectionary for all the readings to cohere. In other words, the second reading does not have its own theme but is chosen to enhance what is set forth in the Gospel and the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures.

I mention this about the lectionary not to be academic or pedantic but because I see some who preach work so hard to explain the scriptures using all kinds of devices. During Lent and Advent as well as Christmas and Easter all the Sunday lectionary readings are selected to work together. I hope below I can kind of demonstrate what I mean.

I will start by noting that our reading from Genesis is what transfiguration looks like in real life. Our reading from 2 Timothy is about how transfiguration happens. In the Gospel, rather than leaving his followers groveling on the ground, Jesus touches them and, as he does so often, tells them to get up and not be afraid. This, too, is how transfiguration happens. It's important to note that Lent isn't about having a good grovel. Jesus loves you too much to want you to do that!

The Greek word translated as "transfigured" is recognizable to us; it is the proper form of the word metamorphosis. This word doesn't so much mean turning into something you're not as it is about transcending, or going beyond, your current form. In Christian terms, it is about becoming who God made and redeemed you to be. You are made and redeemed to be like Jesus Christ. This becoming is called sanctification. I would point out that to be like someone is not to be identical to that person. Aren't there people you know who you want to be more like? This is not the same as wanting to be her/him.

As the Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes) teaches, it is Christ who "fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear." "The Christian... conformed to the likeness of that Son Who is the firstborn of many brothers," the constitution continues, "received 'the first-fruits of the Spirit' (Rom. 8:23) by which [s/]he becomes capable of discharging the new law of love" (sec. 22).

It is no small thing when, after seeing things in kairos time, which is how God sees things- with God past, present, and future are simultaneously present (this why/how Peter, James, and John were able to see Jesus with Moses and Elijah) "they saw no one else but Jesus alone." It is Christ alone who restores our likeness to God, which is lost through sin. Jesus Christ not only affects the metamorphosis the Christian is to undergo, but he is also the form into which s/he is to be changed.

As the story of Abram (who became father Abraham) shows, this transfiguration, this conversion, is a journey. It takes time. It takes movement both human and divine. Eugene Peterson described Christian discipleship as "a long obedience in the same direction." Like Abram, we must respond to God's initiative. This response is faith.

As our reading from 2 Timothy teaches us, this conversion is accomplished by bearing "your share of hardship for the Gospel." What else does Jesus mean when he insists that anyone who follows him must pick up his/her cross?