Hallow, New Man!

The Baader-Meinhof Word of the Day is transform. Once I started thinking about it, it began appearing everywhere.

Paul uses the word twice, advising us to not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind (Rom 12:2); ultimately we are being transformed into the [image of God] from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord (2 Co 3:18).

It shows up seventeen times in the book I read a couple days ago (Salvation); if we toss in related words like "growth" and "change," then there's something on nearly every page. 

Likewise the much more substantive Three Ages of the Spiritual Life by Garrigou-Lagrange. I'm reading that one much more slowly, like a chapter a day. Here are a few passages that touch on our subject, either directly or really directly:

We reach up to God and God reaches down to us, and in divine love we are made sharers of the Divinity.

What human nature can never do can be done in the supernatural power of divine grace.

Because our interior life descends to us from on high, it can reascend even to God... 

[T]he deification of the intellect and that of the will presuppose the deification of the soul itself (in its essence) from whence these faculties [intellect and will] spring.

[T]he inward man is renewed day by day. His spiritual youth is continually renewed... by the graces which he receives daily. 

[G]radually there disappears what St. Paul calls "the old man" and there takes shape "the new man."

Hello, new man! 

This new and inward man

is renewed unceasingly in the image of God, who does not grow old. The life of God is above the past, the present, and the future; it is measured by the single instant of immobile eternity.

Here is a sampling of similar passages from Salvation, which is 

an unmerited gift of righteousness that actually transforms us.

Humanly speaking, what God calls us to is completely beyond our reach. It is truly impossible.

D'oh! 

What is impossible with men is possible with God.

Woo hoo! 

[Grace] enables us to become something more than our human nature alone could ever achieve.

"Paul holds that believers are truly changed," for "if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation." We are "truly remade."

We'll leave off with a few passages from Balthasar's Heart of the World, which I also recently reread slooooowly:

Here the old man is replaced by the new. Here the world dies and another world rises. Here the two eons intersect. Here every ending becomes a beginning.... Here springs forth out of the hardest rock the water of eternal life. Here the road of reason and faith sprouts wings.... Here is bridged the chasm between heaven and earth.

Patient as a seed, we are to let your Kingdom grow in us...

You transfigure enigma and replace it with mystery.... you take each being to yourself and, without destroying its reality, you confer upon it a new being. You change refuse into jewels...