There’s a letter from Marcel Văn to his spiritual director where he says:

As for me, I always keep a smiling face; my sufferings remain secret; I force myself to hide them…

His sufferings, while real, are forced into hiding so that the Spirit’s work can appear on the lines of his face and in his gestures and in his body, down to his fingertips. The transfiguration of the body by the Spirit isn’t without effort. Like all things in the spiritual life, we have to try. Of course the Spirit comes in and says, “What you cannot do, where you are weak, where you fail and where it deeply hurts that you fail: let me take it.” But this would be meaningless unless we, too, really tried.