The Opening Prayer for the Eighteenth Sunday (A) in Ordinary Time asks that the Lord “may restore what you have created and keep safe what you have restored.” Let’s focus on the verb “restore.”

“Restore” suggests something has lost some original characteristic, whose restoration recovers something valuable about that thing. The term “restoration” is typically applied to art, something noble and elevated that, over the course of time and through wear and tear loses some of its original luster. The 14-year long “restoration” of the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, for example, brought out intense colors that had been obscured by centuries of candle smoke and grime. So marked was the change that some critics even pronounced the original tones “garish,” preferring the dull and muted hues to which they had grown accustomed.

Things in need of restoration require it because they are not what they were originally intended to be. The original design is normative, whether created by Michelangelo or the Creator. That’s true of art. And true of people.

The Collect’s focus on restoration points to the centrality of conversion to the Christian pilgrimage. The primacy is conversion, not accompaniment. Restoration is returning to the Maker’s original purpose which, in the case of man, is to “know, love, and serve God in this life and to be happy with Him in the next.” Even more so, as St. Irenaeus of Lyons succinctly put it, to be “fully alive.”

The work of Redemption is fundamentally a work of restoration — restoration plus more because God gives us an even deeper relationship and dignity than we might have had but for that “happy fault.” He gives us His Son.

Sr. Leonia Nastał (1903-1940) was a Polish nun of the Little Servant Sisters of the Immaculate Conception who was declared a “Servant of God” in 2016. Her spiritual journal, “I Believed in God’s Eternal Love,” speaks of Christ’s Indwelling as the work of a Divine Restorationist:

Jesus, living in your soul, works with you like an artist who completes a planned work. Jesus knows the plans of eternal love for you. Jesus sees how you have been in the eternal plan of God, and all his actions tend for you to be as God saw you in… [the] womb. Already, with the creation of the first man, God said: ‘Let us make man in our image and likeness,’ but that likeness of soul was destroyed by original sin and deformed by numerous personal sins. Do you know what Jesus does? Like an artist who finds a dusty and damaged painting, one that everybody passes by, ignoring it indifferently. He cleans and washes it, uncovering all the delicate traces of the strokes of the paint brush that attests to its masterful Creator, until he fills in all the lacunae and wins first prize for discovering a valuable antique.

That “antique” is man; the Lord is like the manager of the household who brings out the old — the old man, recalling his original vocation — and the new: the new man, restored in Christ.

Pope St. Pius X’s motto was “to restore all things in Christ,” one he took from St. Paul (Eph 1:10). But the motto was first Christ’s. He is the Divine artist engaged in the work of restoration of what God has created and who keeps safe what He has restored.