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.