By Love dwelling in us and forming our will, we become like God. This transformation in Christ, which the Eastern Fathers often called transfiguration, is described by Saint John of the Cross as the lover (female) transforms into the lover (male):

amada en el amado transformada

Well, pardoning my Spanish is probably enough to ask of anyone. But pardoning my Italian is another task for today. In her Dialogue, Saint Catherine expresses the same notion, that it is in a union of a single love that we are transformed into another, and, in this case, Christ:

This is the state of two dear friends, for though they are two in body, yet they are one in soul through the affection of love, because love transforms the lover into the object loved, and where two friends have one soul, there can be no secret between them…

The barriers come down in love. In love, the will responds and becomes one with another; in love and in the will only, not in substance or nature. But definitely it is proposed to us, by our God, in love.

This, for Catherine, is the mark of passing into the first states of what, for Saint John of the Cross, is contemplation. We no longer only work – work with our actions in servility, work with our meditations in our mind – for God. We pass into periods of contemplative love in union of will with the One – and the Three – who created and redeemed us. The barriers start to fall. They are many, but they fall, one layer at a time. And we, for shorter or longer periods, find the One we have been seeking, but who has always been seeking us yet more eagerly.

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• Pardon My Spanish