Some years ago a friend let me know that my childhood home had been demolished for a new development. I was now living in a different country but nonetheless felt sad that the home of my early memories no longer existed. A few years later we were able to visit the area and found that it had been totally transformed by the building of a number of units for independent living for people with special needs. We were able to wander around the area and reminisce. So much had gone: there was no evidence that a home had been there; the trees we climbed had gone; our secret escapes to the river had been walled up. Eventually, I was able to be grateful for what had replaced ‘my’ home, both for the new buildings and for the inner process in reaching acceptance mostly because the transformation was now providing homes for others.
The spiritual journey of transformation is about change, about altering our values, about dealing with our resistances- ‘distilling’ our defences, about letting go, about gratitude for the ‘now’ and honouring the past where we began our human and spiritual development. For each of us it is a unique process of growing in love and becoming who God wants us to be. We are not alone in this journey. God has invited us to surrender to His will and His plan for us. It is through His Son that we will learn about who He wants us to be and it will be realised by the gift of the Holy Spirit.
The map for this journey is offered by Jesus when He says to His listeners: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life – no-one can come to the Father except through me (Jn14:6) George Herbert (1593 – 1633) in his poem ‘The Call’ uses these words in the first verse in a personalised way:
Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way, as gives us breath:
Such a Truth, as ends all strife:
And such a Life, as killeth death.
Herbert’s poem is only thee verses long, each verse starting with a yearning ‘Come’. Some comments made on this poem acknowledge that deep in our hearts is a sacred hunger for completeness and ultimately as we are not able to heal ourselves we invoke the One who creates, upholds and redeems our
every moment. We pray with hope and longing that our resistances may lessen and thus make space for God so that grace may do its work in and through us. It invokes God to come and touch us back into life; Christ as his Way does not make him breathless as many other journeys do but rather gives him (and us) His breath; Christ as Truth comes as peace and healer; as Life he is a God of endless beginnings and endless fidelity.*
Our surrender to living Jesus’s Way will be through His transformative love in the ordinariness of our daily lives. St Teresa of Avila in The Way of Perfection speaks to her sisters on the need to love others, the importance of detachment and the necessity of humility. In loving others the focus will move from satisfying our own ego needs to how Jesus taught us to care for others with compassion, concern and action. Detachment is not about aloofness or becoming removed from all we are gifted with but rather being grateful for the gifts that can be used as Jesus wants. It will allow the letting go of status and need for control and thus surrendering to His will. Humility will mean being honest and authentic in our relationships with God, ourselves and others. In our daily lives there will be a change of perspective and a shift of motivation that arises from a deepening relationship with God especially through our prayer life. It is the backdrop to the daily choices we make. Prayer is central in our journey of Transformation, being with God just as we are. ‘Come now, let us talk this over’ (Is 1:18) and ensuring a quiet space for us to listen to Him.
This journey will take us through moments of joy and desert times – when our woundedness and incompleteness meets with the redemptive love and healing of Jesus’s wounds and where we learn something more of the hope of the Paschal Mystery.
*My Sour-Sweet Days by Mark Oakley. George Herbert and the Journey of the Soul.
Trish Murphy
