The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Mt 6:22–23)

There are two ways to view this passage: one regards spiritual things and another regards physical things.

As regards spiritual things, the older tradition, at least in the Latin Church, views “healthy” here as being “simple”. A “simplicity of intention” towards God and, by extension, created things, is what is heard. If we want the “one thing necessary”, we have light. I remember reading such interpretations in, for example, Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity. Others, like Saint Alphonsus, stress that our eye has to be “simple” in itself for the sake of chastity.

This is good.

But there’s also the question of the physical meaning. Jesus clearly talks about our eyes and the fact that they are lamps.

When I was first learning about Christianity and working my way through reading the Bible the first few times, someone explained this passage to me something like this. Jesus says the eye gives light as a lamp. In reality, we know now that the eye receives light; it does not give it. This was a common scientific presupposition in Jesus’ day, and he simply works with it to make a point.

Today I would happily say that this explanation is very unsatisfying.

In fact, I think it truly misses one of the points regarding light.

I’ve seen photos of the eyes of Blessed Charles of Jesus. I’ve seen photos of Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity. I’ve seen photos of Saint Thérèse. I’ve met people whose appearance has given me the same impression as these saints. In the presence of holiness, it’s possible for eyes to be a lamp. It’s possible for eyes to give off light, a kind of spiritual light. It is possible, because the saints show the possibility. It is not a bright, overpowering light. It’s a serene, confident light. But it is certainly a light. It is certainly a gift from the eyes. In some very certain way, the eyes are not receiving; they are giving. And what they give is like spiritual light.

In fact, all of this is so real that Philipp Veit, a painter-friend of Saint Clement Hofbauer’s, claimed that it was difficult to capture the expression of his eyes because he “is always looking within.” It’s so real that, for some people, the reality is something of a problem: How do you describe or represent this spiritual reality?

In the measure that the indwelling Trinity takes us, burns us gently, and converts our hearts into divine love (without losing our human nature), we are transformed. But when we are transformed, we are also transfigured. The image in the tradition is that or a piece of metal thrown into the fire. It remains metal. Its impurities are burned away. It takes on the burning colour and light of the fire. So it is with contemplative love.

When all our faculties and thus, in some unpredictable way or another, our body are transfigured by the divine light, then how could our eyes only take and receive light from the earth? Surely, then, their primary, overriding function would be to give divine light. And that’s exactly what Jesus says happens.

(Transfiguration is not just an invention of the Christian tradition. It’s also a firmly Scriptural concept.)

When the eyes are not a lamp, we are in darkness. When the eyes cannot give light, we are in darkness inside. That is, when the eyes are searching, hungry, wanting to consume the world or wanting something from the world (which Saint John calls the “lust of the eyes”, 1 Jn 2:16), then everything inside is already dark. Eyes may be lamps, or they may be hungry. Eyes may give, or eyes may receive.

It seems a paradox. But that’s actually what Jesus says: the eye can be the lamp of the body. It can be the first place in our body touched by transfiguration and grace. And this makes a lot more sense than any other explanation I’ve heard of the “physical” or “biological” Gospel passage, because it actually takes Jesus’ choice of words seriously, as well as the experience of the Church.

Related posts:

• “Here One Becomes a Saint Quickly!”
• Blessed Charles de Foucauld
• Some Beings Have Been Transfigured – Why Not Us?

I am never alone: my Christ is always there praying with me, and I pray with Him.
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906)

For you become Himself:
truly, no longer you.
The transformation… yes,
each moment it occurs.
From a poem of Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906)

It seems to me that the attitude of the Blessed Virgin during the months that passed between the Annunciation and the Nativity is the model of interior souls, of beings that God has chosen to live within, at the bottom of the abyss without bottom. In what peace, in what recollection Mary gave to and received from all things! How the most commonplace things were divinized by her! Because, through it all, the Blessed Virgin remained the adorer of the gift of God.
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906)

Have you not found that while we are active and appear to be filling Martha’s role, the soul can remain buried in contemplation, like Magdalene, like a thirsty man near the fountain?
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906)

One way that catches my eye is that of Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity. In a poem, she sings,

God in your heart’s asleep,
you think? Well, understand
You’re not to wake him up!
for that’s another grace.

It’s “another grace” to feel like God is awake. We don’t always get it. We don’t always receive such a grace. Undoubtedly, this is for our benefit, for God is all Goodness. But sometimes it does happen that the night is dark and all we have is faith, as our faculties and, especially, our will, are being purified. If we don’t feel, keep going. It’s “another grace” to feel and know with sensible consolations, or even consolations of the intellect and will. Just know, believe, and keep going in trust. We don’t decide what graces we receive; we simply are thankful for the ones we have, and in all cases, we keep going.

I like this way of thinking:

You’re not to wake him up!
for that’s another grace.

Related posts:

• The Dark Night’s Dryness Experienced in the World
• The Necessary Logic of Dark Nights According to Saint Alphonsus
• Dark Night of the Soul: East and West
• Dark Night of the Soul Lived Outside the Cloister

• I read that we read biographies of saints to learn how to be holy. I thought about this. Then I asked myself, “Is this true? Why do I read biographies of saints?” I decided that I read biographies of saints primarily to make friends in heaven. My friends will then be present and teach me, not the books. This isn’t special. It’s just a weakness. A weakness as an opportunity! Learning from a friend is a lot easier than learning from a book.
• I also re-read some of my old poems. I asked, “Why do I write poems that have little literary value?” I decided that the answer is related the answer to the previous question about biographies. Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity is my friend; she wrote poems that, they say, didn’t measure up in literary terms, too, but expressed something important to her. It’s a “friendship thing”. Love and friendship cause imitation, so I just write poems. Friends “rub off” on me. This sounds simple enough for me. ^^

If you only knew how sometimes I feel so homesick for heaven; I want so much to be there, near Him. It would make me very happy if He were to take me, even before I entered Carmel, for Carmel in heaven is even better… When I tell Mother Prioress how I feel, she says I am lazy…

But she’s not lazy! When the saints want to give up, it means exactly the opposite. It means that only God’s will matters and that love is everything, whether here below or in heaven, wherever God will have us situated to be doing good on earth.

Related post:

• When the Saints Want to Give Up

Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity, who died at the age of 26 in the Carmel of Dijon, but who had lived until 21, and while desiring ardently to enter Carmel, in the world and knew from experience the value of contemplation in the midst of the world’s ups and downs, wrote to her younger sister:

How simple and consoling it is! In the midst of your motherly cares and occupations you can withdraw into this solitude and give yourself up to the Holy Spirit. He may thus transform you into God, impressing the divine image of His beauty on your soul, in order that, when the Father looks down on you, He may see nothing but His Christ, and may say, “This is my beloved daughter in whom I am well pleased!”

I like this passage very much, and I want to quickly look at each part in turn.

First, she says,

How simple and consoling it is! In the midst of your motherly cares and occupations you can withdraw into this solitude and give yourself up to the Holy Spirit.

This is as if to say: Everyone can walk the way of contemplative love with the Trinity! It is simple. It is beautiful. It comforts and consoles us to know this.

Then, she says,

He may thus transform you into God, impressing the divine image of His beauty on your soul

She is echoing, among others, John of the Cross, of course, in his insistence on the transformation of the soul and consequent, but humanly unpredictable, transfiguration of the body by the Spirit. We will become like God. We will be divinized. That is the result of contemplative love. Everything can be changed. God is all-powerful.

And she specifically recalls the theme of the Transfiguration itself:

“This is my beloved daughter in whom I am well pleased!”

This links us back to the Transfiguration that the three disciples witnessed (Mt 17:5; 2 Pt 1:17). This was a very visible event. It was not a mysterious, hidden reality only. It was also seen with the eyes. It was full of light. And that is exactly what transformation does to us. It changes us, even down to the tips of our fingers and the lines of our face. This happened to Elizabeth herself, whose gaze was described as “luminous” and “serene” (no small feat, since, as a child, it had been forceful and self-willed!).

Élisabeth Catez, future Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity

The soul needs silence in order to adore Him.
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906)

I have found heaven on earth, since heaven is God and God is in my soul.
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906)

What a consolation to give God to souls and souls to God! Life becomes something completely different when we look at it from this point of view.
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906)

Prayer, the heart-to-heart, must never end.
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906)

By “suffering” divine things is meant being well affected towards them, and united to them by love: and this takes place without any alteration in the body.

The first half of this statement is wonderful. The second half is not so wonderful. What Thomas obviously means is that “this takes place without any alteration in the body necessarily following a particular mode in a particular subject.”

Or if he didn’t mean this, I’d say, “Saint Thomas – not so fast!”

In point of fact, charity does or can transfigure the whole person, body and soul (see this excellent book by Father Le Guillou). Love is applied by God to the soul. It immediately takes hold of the best parts of us. Because that’s where it’s applied, there is no necessary link in any particular way between the soul, especially in such high, spiritual effects as love, and the body. It’s impossible to say how a person will be or can be transfigured by love. This is a secret. It’s a divine secret. How things overflow from the soul into the body is a secret. It’s especially a secret to the one suffering it, especially the more deeply and selflessly she suffers it.

But it is possible to say that a person will be or can be transfigured by love. For example, Saint Paul writes,

… we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. (2 Cor 4:11)

Do we doubt it’s possible? Just look at the face of Saint Thérèse or Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity or Blessed Charles de Foucauld. It’s there. It’s real.

It just takes a look at the following picture:

There are people who say, with varying degrees of seriousness, “Who is he?” “Is it an icon?” “How did they get a photo of Jesus?”

It’s a beautiful reaction. A true reaction. A profound reaction. There’s something about the face of this man, Blessed Charles: particularly the eyes. Love comes from or through them. It is not just a human appearance.

In point of fact, the transfiguration of the whole person, body and soul, by charity is a theme of the whole Church. To be sure, it is particularly strong in Eastern Christianity. But it’s universal. It’s a very strong theme in Saint John of the Cross, too. One of many clear examples is in the Living Flame of Love:

The very fire of love that afterward is united with the soul, glorifying it, is what previously assailed it by purging it, just as the fire that penetrates a log of wood is the same that first makes an assault on the wood, wounding it with the flame, drying it out, and stripping it of its unsightly qualities until it is so disposed that it can be penetrated and transformed into the fire. (St 1, #19)

Or:

When he wills to touch somewhat vehemently, the soul’s burning reaches such a high degree of love that it seems to surpass that of all the fires of the world: for he is an infinite fire of love. Because the soul in this case is entirely transformed by the divine flame, it not only feels a cautery, but has become a cautery of blazing fire. (St 2, #2)

Such a burning does not destroy, it divinizes and “burns gently”. It’s impossible to imagine a transformation of the soul so total that it has no effects on the body.

This transfiguration of the whole person by love is believed by Christians.

In our day, we have photographs of saints. We can see transfiguration by love, too. We can witness it. We can witness it in the beatified and canonized saints; maybe once we witness it in them, we can witness it in faces we meet.

We can pray that our appearance, our gestures, our habitual changes in body accompany the same rhythm as God’s preparations and activity in our soul.

Does passio divinorum “take place without any alteration in the body”? “Saint Thomas – not so fast!” ^^

A supernatural soul never deals with secondary causes, but with God alone. Oh, how its life is simplified!
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906)

It is the payoff of divine love. There, Jesus gives us not only his merits, his sorrows, but He also gives Himself to us. Only a God could have conceived such a thing, such an intimate union.
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906)

Happily, all the while being [busy like] Martha, we can stay always near the Master, like Magdalene, contemplating him with a loving gaze.
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906)

We must be aware that God dwells in the depths of us and we must do all things with Him, then nothing is commonplace even when we are performing the most ordinary tasks, because we do not live in these things. We go beyond them.
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906)

I find Him everywhere while doing the wash as well as while praying.
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity

It is the whole Trinity that dwells in us, all this mystery that will be our vision in Heaven: may this be your cloister.
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity to a friend in the world

i love you jesus

jacques maritain and the little brothers of jesus

jesus in thai art

what are the signs of the dark night of the spirit from st john of the cross?

charles de foucauld contemplative

john of the cross on action and contemplation

elizabeth and guite catez

jesus and children

how can christians live a contemplative and active life together

is everyone called to contemplation?

This one also makes me smile:

mud catholic thailand blog

But when you search for it, I’m not the first hit. Now that’s weird.

I hope I’ve remembered the details of this story well.

Not that many years after the death of (Blessed) Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity, a bishop was visiting the Carmel of Dijon. He saw a portrait of Elizabeth. He asked how long she had lived in Carmel. “Five years,” he was told. (Elizabeth died at the age of 26.) The bishop remarked, “Here one becomes a saint quickly!”

The point is not that the Carmel of Dijon was a special place to become holy. That’s not the point at all, because Elizabeth herself insisted on the universal call to sanctity and the universal offer made by her “Three”.

What is the point, then?

The point is that it is by the luminous and serene look on her face that he knew that the Spirit of God was active deep in her life, down to her eyes and her face. Based on on the luminous appearance that the Holy Spirit had brought about in her, Elizabeth was perceived by someone to be a saint. That’s transfiguration down to the very tips of our fingers and lines of our face.

The image of the saint induced a moral certainty in the bishop as regards her holiness.

No human activity, not even contemplation and the love of God, is without some sort of link to our body. The link may be unpredictable and sometimes obscure – but it is certainly real. Do we want to, in all the little details, exude the spiritual love of God almost physically? Do we want to become a living icon? Then we can, at least, ask for such a grace. We cannot procure it by ourselves, but we can be transformed by God.

I start by thinking about many quotes that come easily to mind. In a retreat on prayer, Charles Cardinal Journet said,

Every truly Christian life, even in its initial stages, must carry within itself something of the beginning of an orientation to contemplation.

We might also take the first words of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange OP’s book on The Three Conversions in the Spiritual Life:

The interior life is for all the one thing necessary.

By this he explains throughout the text, that all must journey into contemplation, be it contemplation primarily in itself or contemplation that nourishes apostolic life.

Echoing the same text about the sisters at Bethany (Lk 10:38–42), Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity says,

This “better part,” which seems my privilege in my beloved solitude in Carmel, is offered by God to every Christian soul. He offers it to you, dear Madame, among all your cares and anxieties.

The common thread in these quotes – and many that could be added to them – is that contemplation is a gift and promise, and challenge and invitation, made in Baptism, made when we became Christians. Its origin goes far back. Its origin goes back, at least, to baptism. The universal call to sanctity in fact implies something of a universal orientation towards contemplative love. It is no extraordinary thing. (It is shame that the word “mystic” sometimes gives this impression in English.) It is just a gift and promise made in Baptism.

Those are some words about Baptism and contemplation.

But what else is contemplation? What is the relationship of “suffering things divine” to the sacramental life?

In relation to Confirmation, for example, contemplation is of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit strengthened in us, confirmed in us, made in us more “adult” in its way of acting, when we received that sacrament.

What about the other sacraments? Do you have any thoughts on this? Despite the fact that I know the sacramental life and spiritual life are totally intertwined, I have given very little thought to many of the specifics. What do you think?

“One thing alone is necessary. Mary has chosen the better part which will not be taken away from her” (Lk 10:42). This “better part,” which seems my privilege in my beloved solitude in Carmel, is offered by God to every Christian soul. He offers it to you, dear Madame, among all your cares and anxieties.
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906)

They say that St. Catherine of Siena always dwelt in her cell even when in the midst of the world, for she lived in that inner dwelling-place which my [sister] Guite, too, knows how to live…
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906)