When Christ touches our hearts and brings us closer to his humanity and to the divine life of the Trinity, the effects in our soul overflow, in some way or another, into our body. This experience of light overflowing into the human body and of the body being taken up by the Spirit, is often called transfiguration.

However, it certainly isn’t any of our business to try to predict how any one person will be transfigured. And it certainly isn’t any of our business to judge negatively as regards the lack of such visual manifestations in anyone.

For example, though profoundly in interior joy through suffering, Little Marcel Văn was often accused of having a “bad” face, partly intended in a moral sense. Surely, this is hardly fair in regards to someone so childlike and innocent. And in response, he himself said (and attributed the words to Jesus in his Conversations with Jesus),

… it is rare that Love appears outwardly. So, it is difficult for a stranger to know what sufferings this soul endures or what consolations it enjoys.

And the more a “stranger” we remain, the more we are unable to perceive. Of course, if we knew the Light so well, we might see it everywhere. The outward appearance, though “rare” and mitigated might then not be so “strange” to us.

There is no sense in making any norms of transfiguration in Christ. We don’t know well the starting state that has been transformed and transfigured. We remain, to some degree, “strangers” to all. And we certainly remain strangers to those whose lives we judge, for judgment implies stepping outside and stepping away.

There are no norms in transfiguration. There are no comparisons. There are no laws that we must try to set down as human beings. As Marie-Joseph Le Guillou says in his book on transfiguration, transfiguration takes all but remains the “secret of God”.

There are none of these predictions. There are only joys and surprises!