Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever. 
In this Feast of the Transfiguration, we continue our series of reflections on Franciscan spirituality, looking at the end or the goal of our spiritual life, which is union with God, which is transfiguration or transformation, perfect transformation.
We'll also look at the means used to reach this end, as well as the fruits or the benefits of those who strive with goodwill towards perfection, towards that perfect union with God. Today we'll begin by looking at the end game of it all.
Every Catholic spirituality, whether in theory or in practice, points us to that goal and purpose of our life, which is union with God. The goal couldn't be any different, given that everyone should aim at arriving at God's standard of perfection for us, and perfection is found in the measure that we unite ourselves to God.
There are different ways of setting out the work for our progressive union with God, and it's in this that various Christian spiritualities diversify. Franciscan spirituality, because it sees God above all as love and creation and the Incarnation and our sanctification as all works of love, even in the return of man to God, Franciscanism will accentuate the important predominance of supernatural charity, which it identifies substantially with grace. So for us, sanctifying grace and charity are the same thing.
The journey towards perfection, meaning towards union with God, isn't a journey that we undertake on our own initiative or that we carry out alone, counting only on our own talents and strength. The interior life, as we like to say, is always a two-person job. It involves grace and the will. It involves the divine initiative and our correspondence. It involves us and Christ together.
From the beginning of our spiritual life, we acquire an awareness of our relationship with God, and if we decided to orient ourselves to God, we do so with our free will, yes, but divine grace comes first. The first movement in the spiritual life is that movement of grace. It's God's movement towards us, a movement which we can choose to embrace or reject. If we say yes to God, then we grow in grace. If we resist, we render God's grace ineffective.
From that first moment, a work of collaboration begins, which doesn't just have two principles on each end, meaning grace from God and free will on our part, but it also has two aspects. One, the passions need to be subjugated; they need to be subdued and tamed. Whatever obstacles there are in us to God's grace need to be overcome and removed. There needs to be renunciation, mortification, saying no to our selfish self. We need to put to fight, put to death, and to fight against the old man, as the apostle calls him in Romans 6:6 and Colossians 3:5. That's one aspect.
The other aspect is virtue. Virtue needs to be cultivated and grown in us. We need to learn how to discern and welcome and embrace the inspirations that come from God. We need to conform ourselves to Christ, unite ourselves to him, to build up in him a new man in justice and in charity.
So the first of those aspects is called the ascetical part of the spiritual life. The second is called the unitive or the mystical aspect. The first demands mostly negative work, the other positive work. The first requires human effort to overcome our fallen nature, corrupted by sin, and the second, the mystical or the unitive part of the spiritual life, what shines out or stands out or dominates is the initiative of grace, which guides us from one spiritual high point to another and to another.
Grace, however, as we always say, is active and present from the beginning. Even the denying of ourselves and the ascetical practices wouldn't be worth anything and wouldn't benefit us if they weren't sustained by God's grace. Thus, the divine inspirations we receive in the unitive or the mystical stage would remain sterile like seeds fallen among the rocks if without goodwill we didn't welcome them and second them by our effort.
The way of perfection can be successfully traveled in two ways. One, by primarily looking at ourselves, by measuring the steps that we've taken, the steps that we still need to take, by having a plan of action for going deeper into our faith and growing, which includes what vices we need to combat, virtues we need to acquire. So putting a lot of focus on ourselves and on our efforts.
Or two, you can travel the way of perfection primarily by having your gaze fixed in another direction, fixed upwards towards Christ, who is the ideal of every perfection. That doesn't mean that we ignore or avoid the efforts that we need to make with intensity and in various ways. The soul has to be awake and vigilant always and exercise its will correctly to the end of our life, but from the beginning we better understand that as indispensable as it is, the will is just a means, a means to which we must have recourse without counting too much on human planning and programs, without trusting too much in our schemes, our schedules, and our routines, which in their mechanical aridity don't give a real precise ideal or idea of the spiritual life as helpful as they are.
Spiritual life is a life that's profound and mysterious precisely because it's supernatural, and it's not reducible to standardized formulas or mathematical equations as disappointing as that might sound to mathematicians and engineers.
More than analyzing ourselves, the Franciscan way looks to fall in love with the idea of Jesus, and in the powerful supernatural attractiveness that He exercises over us, we find the strength to overcome the obstacles that nature places in the way of that road of perfection. Even at the beginning, the ascetical work is placed in relation to the scope that it aims at, which is destroying what's bad in us in order to build up what's good, renouncing oneself in order to conquer oneself, a renouncing so that Christ will triumph in me essentially. Detachment is always a means for arriving at union with God, which is the supreme need of love. 
Love is at the top of the interior life; it's like the fire that absorbs and consumes everything. But Franciscans insist that love is also at the beginning of the spiritual life, like a spark that begins the fire of repentance and feeds mortification.
So the first path of growth, primarily ascetical, personal conquest path, is the more non-Franciscan one because it gives more importance to your own personal activity. That's what's called anthropocentric spirituality, man-centered. The second path, which prizes above all the working of grace, is theocentric or Christocentric spirituality. It's primarily mystical, and precisely that is the focus of Franciscan spirituality without denying or neglecting the other. Focus on Jesus more than on yourself, that's the Franciscan path, in a nutshell.
Let's ask Our Lady for the grace to embrace and to really follow that path.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.