Recreated in Christ’s Image
Through grace we are recreated in the image of God.
In 1376, St. Catherine of Siena wrote a letter to her friend and spiritual director, Fr. Raimondo of Capua, in which she stated that Christ is creating us in His image. She didn’t say, as is expected, that we were “created” in God’s image, as if that creation has been completed. Instead, this creation is ongoing, perpetual, and current.
Look at yourselves, for in Him you will find yourselves, and in yourselves, Him. What I mean is that you will find yourselves in Him in that He is creating you in His own image and likeness ... and within yourselves you will discover God’s boundless goodness in having taken on our likeness by the union the divine nature has effected with our human nature. Let our hearts explode wide open, then; as we contemplate a flame and fire of love so great that God has engrafted Himself into us and us into Himself! Oh unimaginable love! It would be enough if we had even appreciated it!
We are constantly being created and recreated, formed and reformed. Because we’ve been given a personal will we have the choice of being formed in God’s image, which is our natural state, or formed in the self-image shaped by our culture, our outward perceptions, our biases and our hurts. We choose whether to be formed with spiritual clay or surface dust.
When we contort ourselves into something unnatural to our authentic spiritual selves, aches and pains and risk of serious injury are sure to follow. We were created to seek ourselves within the shelter of our true beinghood, our spiritual nature, our natural state of existence. We’re designed to do the will of God; we were initially created in God’s image, and that blessed creation never stops. We’re continuously being created through Christ’s graces, if we allow ourselves to blossom forth into the shape and contours of who we truly are—beautiful and blessed children of God.
The choice is wholly ours. We can follow our personal will and contort ourselves into illusion, pain, and non-being, or we can follow God’s will to emerge within the shape He desires for us to take.
St. Caterina’s most famous saying is, “I am she who is not; God is the One Who Is.” We are nothing if not formed by the grace of God. We may try, and struggle, and hope to achieve surface success, but the more we struggle the more we suffer, and the further we get from our authentic selves until, at some point, the vast difference causes us to forget. This state of spiritual forgetfulness is the a foretaste of hell; the willful neglect of our God-self within, the disregard for the Kingdom. A foretaste of hell here on earth is where we dwell when we’ve contorted ourselves to such a degree that perversion and injury become the “norm”—because the true norm has been utterly neglected and rejected.
Before we contort ourselves to such a degree, we need to take a deep breath, unwind our limbs, lie flat in silence, and allow God to wash over us. We need to allow our true image to reform. Even if we’re at the place where we can’t recall why we need to remember our spiritual selves and the image of God within, we need, on faith, to allow God’s cocoon to form around us.
Through rest, through stillness, through contemplation and prayer, the small, still voice of the Holy Spirit will begin to be heard again. When we emerge from our restful cocoon, reshaped and reformed, we have truly been rejuvenated in God’s image. As we live our days in prayer and inner stillness, peace and spiritual clarity, the voice of the Holy Spirit becomes louder than the voice of our surface-selves. It’s then that we find ourselves choosing to be constantly made, each and every moment, in the image Christ gave us through the example of His life, His death, and His Resurrection.
The butterfly emerges, and we are resurrected in Christ. Every day, again and again, we’re made and remade in Christ’s image.
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