When I was five years old, I received the most wonderful Christmas gift I could imagine: a children’s dictionary. It was my first real book and began a life-long love of words. On that Christmas morning I opened to the very middle of the book and my imagination was caught by the first word I saw: “metamorphosis.” Ok, perhaps it was the picture of a beautiful butterfly next to the word that first caught my attention, but that only made me want to understand this word even more. This process, the transformation of a caterpillar to a butterfly, became a word of hope as I grew up and a reality when I came into the experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit as a teenager—the reality that my life could be transformed through recognizing Jesus as Lord of my life and receiving the love poured out by God through the gift of the Holy Spirit.
 
As many of us know, this transformation that we experience through baptism in the Holy Spirit is truly an ongoing process of living the grace that we have received and learning to grow deeper in relationship with God. We grow in this relationship through growing in our prayer life. St. John Vianney, in reflecting on our call to pray and love, stated that, “prayer is nothing else but union with God.” He continued by describing the “sweetness and serenity” of a pure heart united with God. This effect of prayer and union with God is part of the transformation that others see in our lives.
 
To understand union with God is to understand the love of God, both in receiving that love and learning to love in return. This journey of under-standing will take our whole lives. This love relationship is not only an interaction between God and myself, it must include and grow in the Christian community to which God has connected us in baptism. “The more we are united to him by love, the nearer we are to those who belong to him” (St. Elizabeth Ann Seton). Anyone who has lived in community, even a small family community, knows that the peace through our union with God can be tested within our relationships with each other, especially when difficult situations arise. Too often we try to work through the situations by ourselves. It is precisely in the most difficult situations that we can rely on the grace that we receive as we grow closer with God. When our own love is lacking, we can lean on the strength and love that Jesus has for the other. As our capacity for love of God grows, so does our capacity to love others.
 
This love for others has a much farther-reaching purpose than simply growing in our immediate communities. Jesus prayed, in John 17:20-23,  “that  they all may be one,” and  that this would be a reflection of the interaction of love between him and the Father, the purpose of this unity is so that the “world may believe” and know that Jesus was sent by the Father. Our union with God and our unity with each other is a witness to the world of the salvation we receive through Jesus because of the love God has for us. So this call to unity is not only for our sakes but for the sake of the whole world, and it is a “call to a union that is as complete as the union between the three persons of the Trinity” (2015 Statement on Unity by the National Leadership Groups available on the NSC website).
 
Pope Francis has described the Church as “a communion of love with Christ and with the Father in the Spirit which extends to brotherly communion.” He continued by saying that as we grow in this union with God and with each other “God’s love burns away our selfishness, our prejudices, our interior and exterior divisions.” This journey of union with God and others is a journey of transformation. May we embrace the transformation that God has done in our hearts and answer the call to be united with Him and those around us for the sake of the Kingdom of God.
 
By Tammie Stevens
Winter 2015 New Pentecost Magazine.
Tammie Stevens was a member of the National Service Committee and worked at Western Washington Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Seattle.