Become (God's Version) of You

Some thoughts on Taylor Swift and the Image of God, in the form of a homily on All Souls Day, at a Catholic High School for Girls

One of the things I love most about Mount de Sales is that as a school you think liturgically. You had off yesterday for the Solemnity of All Saints, and you tend to celebrate important moments like today’s Sophomore Pin Mass in tandem with the Church’s major feasts like today’s Feast of All Souls. 

This does, however, present a challenge to the one preaching on such occasions, as it would seem to be my job to somehow connect the MDSA Pin and All Souls together; and in this case, the bridge between the two is not exactly obvious. A trick I picked up along the way that’s handy in situations like these is to look for an interlocutor to pivot from one idea to the other. As I survey the field, I can see a couple of options. I could turn to a great theologian like St. Thomas Aquinas or an insightful spiritual writer like St. Catherine of Siena (and earn kudos from the Sisters for choosing a Dominican saint). Those are homilies I’d like to write, and you may have found them interesting, possibly even beneficial to your lives as high school students. But then another, maybe better idea came to me: how about instead I use Taylor? (Yes, that Taylor).

Let me start with some background. 1989 was the first Taylor Swift album I ever listened to. It came out in 2014, the fall of my senior year of college. I have never liked country music whatsoever, so Taylor wasn’t on my radar until she became a pop sensation with 1989. I moved to Italy for grad school in 2015 and was abroad for the release of Reputation and Lover, so I never really got into them. I started paying attention again with Folklore and Evermore, which together are my favorite of her albums. (You’ll appreciate them more when you’re older). All that’s to say, I have enjoyed the re-recorded Taylor’s Versions of her early albums, because I never listened to them much in the first place.

But what has captivated my attention more than the albums themselves is the project of self-re-creation she has undertaken in them. Taylor is not only re-recording and re-releasing her old songs again so that she can regain ownership over her music that was sold out from beneath her; she is, song by song, album by album, remaking who she is from the very start of her career until now. What she’s aiming at is the triumph of Taylor’s Version of both her music and of her very person over any other version of her, real or contrived, that might exist in our minds. In her mind there exists an image of herself that a younger and less mature version of herself was unable to see. Her project, now, is about bringing that image to fruition.

I’m a handful of years younger than Taylor, and I’m also a bit less famous than she is, but I can sympathize with her desire to re-create herself. I’d wager you can too. Seniors, maybe in your fourth year at Mount de Sales you’re not totally happy with the person you’ve become and perhaps you’re looking forward to college to push the rest button. Freshmen, maybe the first couple months of high school have been tough to find your footing and you’re still not sure which of the various crowds is the one where you belong. Juniors, the uncertainty of what comes next might evoke existential questions about who you are and what you want to be that, now for the first time in your life, you need to take seriously. Sophomores, you might find yourselves, to quote one of my favorite novels, in “your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first,” and, too, are looking for a way to restart.  No matter who we are and where we are in life, we probably aren’t completely content with who we are and with who other people think we are; and so there is something deeply attractive about the possibility of re-creating our identity and starting fresh.

You and I don’t have Taylor Swift’s resources to do that; and to be honest, she doesn’t either. No amount of money or influence can remake us. But dare I say: we have something more. In addition to the version of who we are now and the version in our mind of who we want to be, there is the version of us that God wants us to be. We all were created in the image of God, and God’s project is about bringing his image in us to perfection. Yesterday, we celebrated the triumph of the saints, those in whom God’s Version has won out. Today, we pray for the souls of the faithful departed who still need more purification and healing for the old versions of themselves to be replaced. And here, at Mount de Sales, we bless and pin our Sophomores that, through this symbol, we may be reminded of the work God has set out to do: changing us, re-creating us, into his version of who we are meant to be.

In God’s mind there is an image of you, which right now remains mostly hidden from you; but over the course of time, if you remain faithful to him, he will bring that image to the surface and displace the other, lesser versions of yourself that, in comparison, can only be incomplete and fake. God’s Version of you is the only real version of you; and ‘becoming holy’ is nothing other than letting God’s Version win out. 

You don’t need to go on a revisionist spree of re-creating everything you’ve ever done. All you need to do is open yourself to the life of grace, to allow whatever is within you that is not of God to be changed into what God desires you to be. The symbols at your disposal are there to remind you: your pins, your medals, your rings. But the real means of change are the grace and mercy of God available to you in sacraments of the Church: in the holy sacrifice of the Mass offered always and everywhere for the living and deceased, in the Eucharist in which Christ’s Body and Blood become the food and drink that change us into him, and in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, which restores us when the image of God within us becomes obscured when we sin and fall short. All of this infuses God’s life within us and transforms us into all what God wants us to be.

If you remember anything from this homily, please don’t let it just be that the priest said he likes Taylor Swift. Remember that who you are is a precious and beloved daughter of God the Father, redeemed from the deceit of lesser versions of yourself by Jesus Christ the Lord, and enlivened by the Holy Spirit to live your true identity in freedom and joy. Let that be what stays with you, Sophomores, as you don your MDSA pin. And let that be what forms you in every moment from now on, that God who has begun his good work in you may bring it —may bring his version of you— to fulfillment.

Homily delivered November 2, 2023 at Mount de Sales Academy.