Lenten Campaign 2025
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The Church puts the Transfiguration of Jesus in front of us twice every year, on the Second Sunday of Lent and about six months later on the Feast of the Transfiguration.
Why? So that we are always reminded to “begin with the end in mind” — and live a life now worthy of what we will be after the resurrection of the dead, when, the Church teaches, we too will have a glorified body. Because, according to the Church, the Resurrection is not just a historical event that can be verified, as I pointed out before, but is also a transcendent event that will transform us.
St. Thomas Aquinas, the Second Vatican Council, and the Catechism all describe what our glorified body will be like.
But I like the way the singer Patty Griffin puts it.
Her 2013 album American Kid is dedicated to her late father, an Irish immigrant and veteran. In addition to reviewing his life, she imagines what heaven must be like for him, a place where you can “Go Wherever You Wanna Go,” including the moon, if you want.
“You don’t ever have to pay the bills no more,” she adds, and he can play the games he played as a child, or even “run a hundred miles just for fun now.”
She was raised Catholic so it is no surprise that her song sees heaven the way the Church does.
In fact, her examples follow St. Thomas Aquinas’ breakdown of the properties of a glorified body: For him the ability to go anywhere is called “subtlety,” the lack of pain is “impassibility,” and the unlimited endurance is “agility.”
These ideas may seem fantastical, but they aren’t.
This glorified existence is possible for us because we are both material and spiritual.
One common error today is materialism. A materialist would say that we are just flesh. We may be able to do more than other animals, but in the end our emotions and thoughts are just hormonal states and brain synapses.
But today, even leading secular thinkers are unwilling to accept that. There is just too much in the human condition that can’t be explained that way — from the truths of poetry to the ability to do math.
The opposite error is to “spiritualize” the human person. When people say their loved ones have become “angels” they are making this mistake — but so are we all when we think that as long as our heart is in the right place, it doesn’t really matter what we actually do.
In reality, soul and body are one thing, together, and we make no sense without both. But if the physical nature of our bodies takes precedence now, the spiritual will take precedence later.
This is what we see in Jesus.
At his transfiguration and Resurrection, Jesus shows how the same body he had in life gained each of the properties of the glorified and “spiritual” body that Aquinas describes.
Jesus could go wherever he wanted to go. He did that in miraculous ways during his life, walking on water, and transporting a boat instantaneously across the Sea of Galilee. But he did it continually after the Resurrection, speaking to the Emmaus disciples and the Christians in Jerusalem without travel time in between, and passing through the locked doors of the Upper Room.
Likewise, after the Resurrection, Jesus had his same body, with its wounds, but in a new way, without agony. He was already living what Revelation says: “There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.”
We don’t see him “run and not grow weary,” as Isaiah puts it, but he had that ability to — as well as another gift Aquinas mentions, “Clarity,” which is the glow seen at the Transfiguration. Jesus promised that “the just shall shine as the sun in the kingdom of their father,” and after he rose, he appeared to Paul in a blinding light.
We already participate in this mystery at least once a week, according to the Church.
Though the spiritual nature of a glorified body “exceeds our imagination and understanding,” says the Catechism, “the Eucharist already gives us a foretaste of Christ’s transfiguration of our bodies.”
How? Because just as the Eucharist, where Jesus Christ is really present, is formed of both the heavenly and earthly, so will our bodies be, it says.
So pray, fast, and give alms now.
If we can control our physical bodies now, we will be free to do amazing things with our spiritual bodies in the future.
And today we celebrate...