When Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos was reassigned from Detroit to New Orleans, his bishop said, “I am sorry that Father Seelos must leave my diocese, for one only has to look at him to know that he is a saint.”

The Holy Spirit, taking up our flesh into the Spirit, engages visibility. That’s the Transfiguration of the body and the Transformation of the whole man into the new, by suffering divine things, praying, indeed contemplating, in the body. Appearances, though it is hard to put our finger on them or to predict them or to judge them, matter. Because, matter matters. That is the way of the God of the Incarnation.