Today’s feast is one on which many consecrated religious, formally or informally, renew their vows and their commitment to ongoing conversion—conversion whose final goal is nothing less than transformation into Christ. The lives and example of Simeon and Anna reveal two indispensable virtues for this transformative journey by which we open ourselves to the fullness of God’s saving Love. Simeon embodies not only faith in God’s promise that he would not see death before beholding the Messiah, but also that crucial virtue of patience by which he quietly and trustingly awaited the fulfillment of God’s word. Anna, for her part, teaches us that unremitting fidelity to conversion is essential if the Holy Spirit is to purify and reshape our hearts through the fire of divine Love. Thus, Simeon—his heart patiently watchful and expectant—is described as coming in the Spirit into the temple just as Mary and Joseph brought in the child Jesus. Likewise, Anna is portrayed as never leaving the temple, but worshipping night and day with fasting and prayer. Patience and unwavering fidelity to conversion are challenges we all must face—especially when our progress seems painfully slow or even nonexistent. Moreover, patience must be joined to the grace of longsuffering: the willingness to remain under the Spirit’s purifying fire rather than flee from its pain. As the Prophet Malachi warns, the Spirit is like a refiner’s fire, and so he asks, who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? Therefore, assisted by the prayers of Mary, Joseph, Simeon, and Anna, let us implore God’s mercy and grace to recommit ourselves fully to the conversion we embraced in our profession of vows, so that through patient endurance and unwavering fidelity, we too may be made worthy to finally behold—face to face—the Christ of the Lord, and the fulfillment of all our longing.