The spiritual life is often described as a journey. To be beatified by the Catholic Church, or named “Blessed,” is to receive official recognition that a person has reached an end to that journey and enjoys the beatific vision, or to “be in heaven.”

But the journey of the Blessed is not over. There’s another, often unseen, leg: the journey back to us on Earth, the conclusion of which is recognized by the church when it canonizes a person as a saint.

Holiness, after all, comes not from the escape from humanity but in the elevation of human nature. I began to understand this when, as an undergraduate student, I was asked to read the book The Way of All the Earth (Notre Dame Press) by Congregation of Holy Cross Father John S. Dunne, in which he tells “The Parable of the Mountain”: Humans from many diverse cultures see the spiritual life in terms of climbing a mountain. The valley of everyday life is filled with the chaos and complications of love and war. The seeker looks to the top of the mountain and sees solitude. God must be there, and the seeker embarks on a journey up the mountain’s slope to find purity and eternity.

God is on top of the mountain, of course, because God is everywhere. But when the seeker gets to the mountaintop, she finds that God has also gone on a journey. Without knowing it, while climbing the seeker passed God descending into the valley of love and war. God is only complete when incarnated among us. And so, to be a fully actualized human being, purified and divinized, one must live among us.

Thus, the Blessed turn around and make the journey back down the mountain into our struggles of love and war, not separate from our world but at the heart of its mystery.