The Pennsylvania Maple Sugar Syrup season has already come and gone. Sometime between the middle of January through the middle of February, during some days of a freeze-that, freeze-thaw cycle, the sap of the Maple trees starts to run.
Maple trees produce a liquid mix of ground water and sugar which moves up and down the tree depending on the late winter temperatures. The trees are tapped and the sap is collected in buckets. Thickened by evaporation forty gallons of the watery sap is transformed into about one gallon of concentrated syrup.
What happens in the outer, natural world is symbolic or reflective of what can happen in our inner world. Transformation is the message of the Maple Syrup Season. Many people won't explore that - like the man in the peach orchard who contents himself with counting leaves.
"You have come a new creation and have clothed yourself in Christ," the priest says to the newly baptized. A new creation! And Jesus said, "I have come that you may have life and have it in all its fullness." John 10:10
Catholics have transformation at the center of their religious-spiritual lives. At every Mass we hear these words prayed over the bread and wine:
Therefore, O Lord, we humbly implore you: by the same Spirit graciously make holy thee gifts we have brought to you for consecration, that they may become the Body and Blood of your Son our Lord Jesus Christ at whose command we celebrate these mysteries.
Eucharist doesn't mean only that the bread and wine are transformed, but we're supposed to be transformed too. Don't just admire Christ, don't just believe in Christ, don't even just content myself trying to imitate Christ, but BE Christ.
But what's the transformation? St. Irenaeus says, "The glory of God is the human person fully alive." The Eastern Christian calls it divinization. One Anglican priest speaks of it this ways: Individuation is the process by which the individual in the course of his/her life is pressed to realize his innate capacities to the full and become what he has it in him to become." And Carl Jung said that to be another Christ means that "I would live my own unique self as truthfully and as beautifully as Christ lived his."
But what's the transformation? St. Irenaeus says, "The glory of God is the human person fully alive." The Eastern Christian calls it divinization. One Anglican priest speaks of it this ways: Individuation is the process by which the individual in the course of his/her life is pressed to realize his innate capacities to the full and become what he has it in him to become." And Carl Jung said that to be another Christ means that "I would live my own unique self as truthfully and as beautifully as Christ lived his."
How do I do that? I might begin by imagining it for myself. We say, You are what you eat. We might also say: You are what you listen to; You are what you read; You are what you look at; You are what you choose; You are what you fall in love with; You are what you desire.
Be Christ! Transform resentment, fear, despair into new energies. That's an important place from which to start. Take Jesus at his word and desire the fullness-life he promises. That full life is for NOW. Innate capacities means that from the moment I came to exist, God had gift-ed each of us with possibilities and potentials. Many of us have never given these things any serious attention.
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| Spring enjoins us to transformation |
