18
True Surrender of Self
AT THE beginning and at the end of the road we navel in the process of our transformation in Christ, we hear Our Lord speak these mysterious words: “He that shall lose his life for me shall find it” (Matt. 10:39). They convey to us the demand that we die unto ourselves and the promise of a new life derived from and centered in Christ.
But the phrase to lose one’s life (indeed, as it is sometimes translated, one’s soul) implies another, more particular element besides that renunciation of one’s natural self whose various aspects have been set forth in the preceding pages. It is the holy paradox of Death and Resurrection that flares up in these words—the mystery of dying with Christ, and awakening to life again with Him. Our study of the theme of transformation in Christ may therefore properly be terminated with a consideration of this aspect.
Surrender to the call of natural values prefigures our surrender to Christ
Even on the natural plane, there is to be found a reflection of the truth of these words in the Gospel. For what determines the spiritual measure of a man, the inner wealth of his personality? Obviously, it is the degree of his awareness of values and the intensity of his adequate response to values. The more aware of values one is, and the more able to display an adequate response to every value, the more he participates in the world of values. In every act of conforming to a true value, there lies a union of our mind with this value. Yet, this conforming involves a kind of surrender: a certain detachment from our self, a certain subordination and abnegation of self.
This surrender involved in our response to values constitutes the only possible way to inward growth; it is in this way alone that we ourselves shall be endowed with values. And this surrender contains something of the losing of one’s life enjoined by Christ upon His followers. It represents, as it were, a natural prefiguring of that loss of life.
Our supernatural transformation presupposes our free surrender to God
Man is in his innermost essence specifically ordained to God. “Thou has created us for Thee” says St. Augustine (Confessions 1.1). In the measure that man submerges himself in his adoration of God, his personality becomes ampler and richer, and adorned with higher values.
Inversely, in the measure that he is concerned with his own self and the consideration enjoyed by that self, he becomes poorer, narrower, more arid, and jejune. That is why, as the example of the holy Cure d’Ars shows, even a man of scant natural gifts may develop into a great and rich personality, if only he gives himself fully and unreservedly to God; whereas, in comparison with such a man, a person who is endowed with the highest natural talents, but who shuts himself off from God, will emanate a barren and oppressive atmosphere.
To be sure, we receive supernatural life, just as the natural one, as a free gift from God’s hand, without any contribution from our part. Yet we cannot become transformed in Christ unless we lose ourselves in our vision of Christ. Only if we immerse ourselves in a loving adoration of Christ, can we be transformed in Him.
Our supernatural life will not expand automatically without our contribution. It cannot spring into full blossom unless Christ becomes for our conscious experience, too, the actual center of our life—in such a fashion that all our life is directed to Christ and is pervaded by our adoring love of Christ. For the unfolding of supernatural life, again, a self-surrendering response to value—referred, here, to God through the medium of the God-Man—constitutes an indispensable precondition.
Yet, evidently, losing one’s soul in this proper use of the term means more than the surrender implied in every genuine response to value. We must, in a stricter sense, die unto ourselves and become empty so that Christ may unfold His holy life within us. Likewise, our surrender to Christ must far exceed all our other responses to value: it must be an integral surrender of self, such as is possible and proper in relation with the absolute Lord only, “in whom all fullness of divinity dwells.” The motif of losing one’s soul acquires then, here, an entirely new—a much more literal, unequivocal, and definitive—meaning.
Surrender to God does not obliterate our selfhood
However, it would be a grave error to interpret this concept of dying to oneself or losing one’s soul as an extinction of selfhood in the crude sense of a depersonalization or neutralization.
Certain religious theorists today seem to assume that one can only get rid of narrow egotism and become imbued with a truly theocentric attitude if one ceases to attach any weight to one’s relation with Christ insofar as this relation is experienced by one’s own consciousness. They would express their theories something like this: “What am I; what are my longings and my love for Christ—is not all this much too small and unimportant to be something in the eyes of God? The only thing that matters is for us to keep step with the great objective rhythm of the holy Church, and, without thinking of our personal problems and situations at all, dedicate ourselves exclusively to the great community of the Mystical Body of Christ; for the latter alone, and surely not our petty little ego, means something to God.” The more I succeed in effacing my own personality, the more, they would say, my attitude must become an objective and theocentric one.
It is these speculations also that have brought forth an attempt at dividing the saints into those having a predominantly objective outlook and those having a predominantly subjective outlook—as though the idea of a saint of subjective outlook were anything but a contradiction in terms.
Only a full, personal self can give himself freely to God
The error that underlies this conception is the more dangerous as it corresponds with the anti-personal spirit of the age, which tends towards a glorification of the collective as such. The propagators of this error give proof of their shallowness of mind by equating personality with subjectivity and measuring objectivity by the standard of impersonality. They forget that God, the Origin of all objective reality and validity, is a Person. They attach the derogatory label of subjectivity to ethos and even to the personal conscious mode of being. In fact it is a certain kind of ethos only that is infected with subjectivism. They are blind to the fact that God is Love—in which we participate according to the measure of our own supernatural love.
They disregard the basic truth that it is only by confronting myself with God, by establishing myself in an I and Thou relation with Christ, by my loving adoration of Christ—and not by any consciousness of being a mere part of a big Whole—that I can transcend the narrow limits of my ego.
At bottom, their doctrine smacks of pantheism; for it tends to confuse qualitative height with quantitative width and comprehensiveness. It tends to substitute an absorption of the person into a vaster human unit for the surrender of man’s ego to the divine Thou. True surrender is properly and eminently a personal act, and the only one by which a person can rise above his inherent limitations. They forget the moving grandeur and eternal importance of every immortal soul. St. Teresa of Avila says, “Christ would also have died to save one single soul.”
If it were true that the individual means nothing, the community would not mean anything either. A community—a State or a nation, for instance—if imprisoned in its economic and power interests, is just as subjective and narrow as an individual so imprisoned. Like the individual, the community can only outgrow its narrowness and subjectivity if it is directed to ends that are important before God.
What defines a mere private interest is not the fact that it is the interest of an individual rather than of a group, but the qualitative circumstance that it expresses a pursuit of mere subjective gratification instead of a purpose important in itself and objectively valuable. The humblest and most hidden concern of an individual, once it has moral value, is no longer a mere private concern.
Inversely, the pure interests of a community as such are, in fact, private concerns. As soon as the purpose in question is important in itself and objectively valuable, it transcends the framework of mere subjectivity and acquires an importance before God, a relationship to eternity. Whether it concerns a single person or a group of persons is not the important point.
The error of anti-personalism has today infiltrated even into some Catholic circles. It can be found, for example, in certain enthusiasts of the so-called liturgical movement. These liturgists are prone to regard distrustfully the mystic and ascetical elements in religion. Any intense emotional attitude towards Christ—any I and Thou relationship with Him—appears to them suspect, subjective. In all depersonalization, on the other hand, they are inclined to see religious progress.
Yet, in truth, every religious progress in our life means a higher stage in our becoming, qua persons, transformed in Christ and participants in His holy life. This life, again, means love—charity unconfined and unending towards God and one’s fellow persons. The index to our transformation in Christ consists in the measure of our participation in His love for God and for men. By becoming depersonalized and neutralized, however, we become incapable of such a participation.
Depersonalization is incompatible with love of God and transformation in Christ
What does God, above all, demand of us? Our love. What is the question Our Lord puts thrice, emphatically, to Peter in that great hour when He entrusts him with the care of His flock? It is the question as to his love. “Simon, son of John, lovest thou me?” (John 21:16).
Those men err who believe it to be our supreme goal that we become pure instruments of God. Certainly—and particularly, insofar as we fill a post in the hierarchy of the Church—we are also meant to be tools of God. But our proper and ultimate vocation is to be transformed in Christ: that is, to become saints. “For this is the will of God, your sanctification,” says St. Paul (1 Thess. 4:3).
So long as we are a mere channel for the flow of God’s will, so long as we are nothing but an impersonal tool in the hands of God, so long as we have no desire other than to discharge a certain function in the universe according to the plan of God, we cannot be transformed in Christ. The attainment of our proper supernatural aim presupposes an entirely different attitude on our part. It requires that we surrender ourselves to Christ by an act of love which is nothing if not eminently personal. It demands that we thus help the divine life unfold in us.
Christ must become the center of our thought, our yearning, and our will. Our every act must be stamped, as it were, with His seal. In all our conscious being we must become imprinted with the Christ-stamp. It requires, indeed, our having that drunkenness with Jesus which was present in the great saints.
Only think of these—of a St. Paul, a St. Francis of Assisi, or a St. Catherine of Siena! What a full personal life it is that pulsates in them! Do they not represent the utmost antithesis to any impersonal and neutral mode of being, yet at the same time, to any subjectivistic narrowness? The secret of their being both at once lies in St. Paul’s words: “I live, yet it is not I who live but Christ who lives in me”; in St. Francis’: “My God and my all”; in St. Catherine’s: “That Thou be, and I be not.” This is the meaning of “He that loses his life shall win it.”
The saints do die to themselves, in the sense of being absorbed by their love of Christ, losing themselves in Christ, and only thus do they find their true selfhood—their self as intended by God.
We must give ourselves unconditionally to Christ
Our integral relationship with Christ—the Head of the Mystical Body which encompasses and sustains us, and works within us—necessarily implies, then, an express confrontation of our I with the divine Thou. True self-surrender consists in our giving ourselves to Christ absolutely, in a spirit of loving adoration; in our full renunciation of our sovereignty; in our becoming empty with regard to all other things. It means that we make no reservation whatsoever; that no province subsists in our personal world over which we still want to reign in our own right or in which we still are somehow asserting ourselves.
So long as we still draw the line somewhere in us (even though we do not expressly formulate that limitation), so long as we, however tacitly, at some point still utter a ne plus ultra which opposes a barrier to the extension of the Lord’s empire in us, we have not given ourselves to Christ in a way that is a true self-surrender. We must really push our skiff from off the shore; burn the boats behind us. The important thing is to do away with all conditions and reservations, overt or hidden. In this matter, very much is of little avail: it has to be all It is only by the totality of our surrender, the heroism—unspoilt by any proviso—of our leap in the dark, that we achieve the loss of our soul.
In true self-surrender, we experience ourselves being possessed by God
But there is one more aspect to this loss of self as implied in true self-surrender: namely, that state of being possessed which we experience when dimly aware of a power stronger than ourselves taking hold of us. In such moments we feel as though, like Habakkuk, we were taken “by the hair of our head” and lifted above ourselves.
Plato has seen—he develops it in his Phaedrus—that all great things are somehow done in a state of madness (the term meaning here, not of course a pathological condition of insanity, hut our being entranced by something greater than we are). Then we thrust off or become enchanted away, as it were, from the secure base which we have laboriously established for ourselves and on which we have built our ordinary life.
These are the moments, then, in which a great thing bursts into our life and shakes its hitherto solid framework. The firm ground on which we have formerly moved securely, able to govern and to order rationally all our affairs, is drawn from under our feet. We no longer have, as we had before, a sense of sovereignty over the situation. That is why Plato attributes a specific value to being in love: for being in love essentially implies a kind of soaring above the normal level of our life, a certain rapture.
Whenever anything thus causes us to soar above the habitual plane of our life, whenever we are possessed by something that overwhelms us not by its mere dynamism but by its objective superiority, we also become delightfully aware that it is precisely this renunciation of our sovereignty which makes us really free.
Only, we must carefully maintain here a keen distinction between two things which resemble each other superficially but in reality are separated by an immense difference. One is a state of mind towering above our normal level of life, the other a condition in which we sink beneath that level.
This is not the only instance of men’s aptness to mix up the supra-normal with what is in fact inferior to normality. Thus, there are not a few who fail to see the difference between purity and lack of sensuality. So also some cannot discern the difference between the peaceful serenity of a saint and the emotional obtuseness of a Stoic—only because they are both opposed to the unstable type, swinging to and fro between the poles of jubilation and of excessive grief. And yet the two are much farther from each other than either is from the normal temperament of a person of warm emotions.
Possession by God is the opposite of abandonment to passion or to mass psychosis
To return to our topic, an essential distinction must be established between one’s being swept off one’s feet by the impact of a dynamic passion as such, and one’s being possessed by something not only stronger but intrinsically higher than oneself. An untrained mind, it is true, will easily overlook that difference.
Many a strong passion may overpower us to such a degree that we no longer know whither we are carried by its wave. Now, what is most characteristic of this state of being swept off our feet is the discarding of our responsible self implied in it. Our central personality, which normally controls our decisions and governs our conduct by its consents and its vetoes—by sanctioning, or withholding its sanction from, whatever course we incline towards—is put out of court; our decisions are taken over its head, as it were.
This is accompanied by a consciousness in us of losing our freedom, of being gripped, dragged about, and dictated to, by something that is not ultimately ourselves. A dynamic influence, stronger but of a lower nature than our habitual set of motives, has dethroned our inner sovereignty and reduced us to a state of dependence. A sort of depersonalization has indeed taken place here, though no neutralization takes place. Our inward integrity and dwelling with ourselves—the habitare secum—is destroyed.
Sensual passions are not the only factor that can produce such effects; men often fall a prey in a very similar manner to mass psychosis in its manifold varieties. Any large group of people, given certain circumstances, may easily form into a mass, responding to some demagogic slogan with a surge of cheap enthusiasm or indignation. We may expect its members, then, to be carried away by the motion of the collective mind, with their rational selves (their moral and prudential consciousness) being obliterated and their center of sanction passed by. The individual feels relieved from responsibility. He is delivered over to an impetuous wave of energy which sweeps aside his self-control and determines his behavior as an irresistible automatism.
No clumsier error could be imagined than to consider this contagion of a sub-personal effervescence as something greater than what originates in one’s personal selfhood. All more highly organized natures that have for a time fallen under such a spell will later, when restored to the use of reason, feel ashamed of yielding to an illegitimate emotion even qualitatively so far below the habitual level of their lives. What a stultifying effect does such a mass psychosis usually exercise on the brains of its victims; how pitiably it depresses the mental standard of the individual!
A psychic rapture of this kind also exhibits the characteristic trait that the subject is not only enslaved by the fascination of the motive that sways him but also enjoys the fact of his intoxication itself, the very condition of morbidly being possessed.
True self-surrender, on the contrary, implies that we are entirely centered upon the object in which we lose ourselves. The value of that which holds us, and by no means the pleasure of being held, dominates our consciousness. One who seeks that pleasure for its own sake errs just as they do who yearn for the thrill of love rather than thinking of the beloved person, and hence never attain real love at all.
There is no point in our longing to lose ourselves in general. What we should long for is exclusively to lose ourselves in Christ. Let us never forget that, though an intense love or enthusiasm as such is undoubtedly a great experience and a fine sight, its value essentially depends on whom or what we love; on the person or thing that evokes our enthusiasm.
Yet, the supreme difference between the two forms of being possessed remains this: that true self-surrender is a sanctioned act, ratified by the free and conscious center of our personality, whereas the state of being swept off our feet implies a specifically unsanctioned mode of behavior, implies a disconnection from or an overriding of our personal center of sanction.
We can freely sanction the loss of our habitual sovereignty over self and circumstance
One reason why this mistake so frequently occurs involves the widespread omission of another, no less significant and necessary, distinction: that between a sanctioned attitude as such and a sovereign attitude in which the subject, entrenched in his securities, maintains himself, as it were, above the situation. To state the exact nature of this difference again requires some explanation.
In our ordinary, natural life we take our stand on a kind of firm ground, propped, mostly, by an elaborate system of conventions. We have devised a framework for our life in which we assign its place to everything that we meet. We are anxious always to maintain our sovereignty over the situation; we seek to preserve, in regard to everything, the consciousness that we have it and are not had by it. We take heed lest anything should grow too large for us to cope with. We keep at a distance from all things we suspect of a tendency to possess us, and accordingly endeavor to diminish great things by emasculatory interpretations, so that they might no longer become dangerous to us. In a word, we fear losing that firm ground under our feet.
And, in fact, we do so justifiedly insofar as it is a question of things that represent no higher reality than we ourselves do; things that may not, on the strength of their objective content and quality, legitimately claim to possess us. Such are, notably, all mere passions: for example, the effect of certain narcotics, or again, the imperious automatism of some kind of professional activity, which tends wholly to absorb us.
The error, however, lies in identifying this routine tendency to remain sovereign over the situation and to preserve the solid ground under our feet with the sanctioning as such. A bold dedication of self, too—a relinquishment of the solid ground on which we feel secure—can be an act sanctioned by our central personality. Faith itself is nothing less than an immense venture: the venture of advancing beyond the naturally ensured base of our cognition. God invites us to engage upon this heroic venture.
Supernatural life as a whole requires us to depart from that firm natural terrain. The Apostles, indeed, left that solid ground when in response to Christ’s sequere me they left everything behind and followed the Lord unconditionally; when they spoke, “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life” (John 6:69).
Yet, they did so, not in an unsanctioned way, yielding blindly to a compelling urge, but in the blissful consciousness which we find in the words of St. Paul, “For I know whom I have believed” (2 Tim. 1:12). They gave themselves wholly to the absolute Lord over life and death, from whom they had received everything. Their departure from the framework of their former lives—their losing of self—bore the most express and most complete personal sanction a human act can bear. Any self-surrender that lacks such a sanction lacks ultimate validity. We must, then, never abandon ourselves to any unsanctioned impulse.
The true state of dwelling with ourselves, again, presupposes what we have called the sanction. But the endeavor to shun all risk and flee all danger of being possessed—to carefully preserve the firm ground under one’s feet—is not consonant (and is even inconsistent) with the true habitare secum, though it represents a kind of illegitimate counterfeit thereof. It is the source of all philistine mediocrity. It is doubtless better to abide on the firm ground of one’s well-ordered natural life than to allow oneself to be swept off one’s feet; but again it is infinitely better to lose oneself in Christ and to be seized by Him than to keep smugly within that secure natural framework.
Not only is such seizure better—it is necessary for us if we are truly desirous of being transformed in Christ. Our abandonment of self is an indispensable condition of the full unfolding in us of supernatural life. For Our Lord says, not only “He that shall lose his life for me shall find it,” but also “He that findeth his life shall lose it.”
We must, then, lose our soul so as to find it. In other words, we should renounce all vain effort to incorporate Christ into our life, but endeavor wholeheartedly, with the full sanction of our central personality, to transpose our life into Christ and entrust it to Him; indeed, to be possessed by Him.
True self-surrender is the antithesis of depersonalization
True self-surrender constitutes the extreme antithesis to depersonalization. In fact, only through such a surrender can we attain the full actualization of our proper personal life—in comparison to which our ordinary self-centered life is but a kind of somnolence. On the other hand, the surrender implied in being carried away by a superior dynamism means a submersion of personality in the vital sphere, an intrinsic degradation of the soul and thus (though not in the sense of becoming a coldly functional instrument of outward aims) it is eminently a process of depersonalization.
True self-surrender clarifies and deepens our vision of things
Furthermore, true self-surrender by no means generates a state of mind in which all things other than those which possess us fade into obscurity, as though immersed in a sort of fog, with their outlines blurred and their distinctions disappearing. Rather, in the new vision bred of true self-surrender, all inferior things are surpassed. The mind is raised into a brighter light, which makes everything enter into its proper place. The depersonalizing type of surrender throws us, on the contrary, into a turmoil, a dull twilight of the mind in which ail higher classes of things lapse into oblivion and invisibility. This kind of experience has the dark lethargic tint of a narcotic trance.
It is true that in the highest form of being possessed—in mystic ecstasy—the mind tends to be aware of nothing besides God. Here all creaturely things may seem plunged in darkness, but this is still an exuberant manifestation of their being surpassed, not a sign of their obliteration. Therefore, as we know from the evidence of the mystics, the mind after its awakening from ecstasy has a clearer and deeper vision of all things as fitted into their proper places under the dispensation of God.
The submersion of all creaturely things in the vision of a soul entirely lost to Him of whom the Apostle says, “Of Him, and by Him, and in Him are all things” (Rom. 11:36), never means a confusion or subversion of the divine order and hierarchy of the universe. This surpassing of all things created, though in the moments of actual ecstasy it seems to amount to their obliteration, leaves their order wholly intact and not only respects but confirms it. It manifests it in a more perfect fashion. After the passing of that transitory stage of darkness, created being will stand out in clearer and brighter outline than ever. The mind that has given itself altogether to God acquires a more penetrating vision of all things.
We should prepare ourselves for possession by God
We can never bring about of our own volition this state of being possessed by and lost in what is greater than ourselves. It can only come to us as a gift of God. But on our side we must develop an eager receptivity towards such a gift, should it be granted. We must have an unhampered readiness to embrace it. We must combat our habit of anxiously clinging to our natural security and attain the boldness needed for a relinquishment of that secure natural base. Joyously and without reflecting on ourselves we should let grace elevate us above ourselves.
Possession by high natural goods will prepare us for possession by Christ
Nor should we cultivate this readiness in view of the exceptional moments only when a special grace of God may call us directly, and the sweetness of Jesus touch our heart. Whenever a sublime beauty in nature or art is offered to us; whenever a great love in Jesus might unite us with a fellow person; whenever the beauty of another soul (its inmost meaning and vocation, the unduplicable thought of God it represents) manifests itself to us and enraptures our heart; in all such cases, too, we should desist from anxiously keeping at a distance and laboring to adjust this impressive thing, once again, to the dimensions of our normal life. Rather we must try to understand the call of God which lies in such gifts. We must lay ourselves open to the impact of the great thing in question.
Here, too, we should not seek to avoid being possessed. But there must be a possession sanctioned by our center of rational orientation and evaluation, and incorporated in the one great possession that is to rule our life: our possession by Christ. Our love and admiration for noble creaturely things will, if thus conceived, also become a path leading us to an ever-increasing unconditional surrender to Christ—by helping us, notably, to overcome our attachment to our secure natural base, our contentment with a medium of petty and familiar safety, our fear of risk and venture.
Every act of giving ourselves to what, even though it has no supernatural connotation, approaches us from above, will help to thaw our heart. It will, ultimately, further our progress towards that state of blissful freedom which is the privilege of those living by Christ—the freedom St. Augustine thus puts into words: “Love, and do what thou wilt” (Treatises on 1 John 7.8). How timid many Christians are; how cautiously they fence round their hearts! Yet, not only does God ask to penetrate into our hearts; it is also His will that His way into our hearts shall be paved not only by the direct operations of grace, but also by great experiences on the human plane, too, provided that these be anchored in Christ.
A true Christian, then, must display this readiness to be possessed which always presupposes his personal sanction. He must be able, in holy courage, to leave the firm ground of familiar securities; he must rejoice in the state of being possessed. But he must not insist on deciding all by himself whether a specified experience may be upheld before the face of God but should make his sanction depend on his director’s decision.
On the other hand, whenever God places in his path anything of great beauty or any other high good which claims to possess him, if, having confronted it with God, he feels justified in according it his full sanction, he should be equally ready to give himself to that elevating force without restraints or preoccupations.
For it is a duty of gratitude to be responsive to the word of God wherever it reaches us: to “keep it in a good and perfect heart” (Luke 8:15) rather than let it “fall upon a rock” (Luke 8:6). It is extremely important for us to profit by the moments when God draws us nearer to Him, when He allows us to be possessed by true values—and so loosens the fetters of our trivial system of petty self-protection and invites us to an act of ultimate audacity and freedom.
To such moments apply these words of St. Paul: “Behold, now is the acceptable time: behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2). To be sure, all such possession by high natural values must be ordained to our true surrender of self to Christ. If this is not the case, we do not hear the call of God; nay, we even abuse His gifts.
If all out life is thus incorporated in Christ so that we consistently seek—and find—Him in every created value, then our being held by the latter implies no submersion in darkness. On the contrary, it helps us to collect ourselves and to realize that true freedom which comes to us from above. It is in such moments—not in the trivial common sense attitude we have to display in our everyday occupations—that our vision is given a valid perspective. It is then that we see the true countenance of things, which we must engrave in our mind so as to evoke it even at times of interior dryness.
In such moments of being possessed by a genuine value, all things shine forth revealing their deeper meaning and their secret ties with superior Reality. In these moments we experience something of what the Scriptures call “the passing by of the Lord.” Then do we rise to an awareness of our true metaphysical situation, and start to see everything in conspectu Dei. This is precisely the infallible test of our being held by a high and authentic created value, a great human love in Jesus, for example.
Then all conventional points of view suddenly fade into insignificance, all our little attachments and shackles of habit—all that we otherwise make so much fuss about and are so unwilling to dispense with—fall from us as if by magic. Then no disorder arises, but on the contrary, all real values become more clearly visible, and are seen even more deeply in their mutual harmony. Everything thus moves into its proper place and manifests the true order of things in conspectu Dei—whereas, when we are enslaved by a mere passion, we see all our world plunged into confusion and disorder.
Again, it is a proof of our basic decision to become a new man in Christ: to cast from us uncompromisingly everything that cannot maintain itself before the face of Christ or is somehow out of keeping with this new life in Christ, no matter how pleasant and familiar it has been to us as an appurtenance of our accustomed life—when we experience a legitimate state of being possessed as a joy-bearing gift; when we yearn to lose ourselves in Christ and say with the Bride of the Canticle of Canticles: “Stay me up with flowers, compass me about with apples; because I languish with love” (Song of Sol. 2:5).
Reference must be made to another dimension of the loss of self, an entirely new one which is confined to the mystic states of mind. The inward death depicted by St. John of the Cross in his Dark Night far exceeds that dying to oneself which we have met with as an aspect of our transformation in Christ. It amounts to a dying of the soul comparable to the experience of being immersed in complete darkness—a negative prefiguration and token of our future total rebirth in Christ. Here, the concept of losing one’s self acquires a greatly enhanced, a very much more literal meaning. The life in Christ which grows out of that surrender implies an immediate experience of Christ, a sensing of the fact St. Paul describes in these words, “I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me.”
This supreme aspect of our transformation in Christ, a classic treatment of which can be found in the writings of many mystics, particularly of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, does not enter into the scope of the present work. It suffices to remark that this phase of man’s transformation in Christ, too, constitutes an essential aspect, in a sense, the crowning aspect of the Vocation expressed in these words of the Lord: “But he that shall drink of the water that I will give him shall not thirst forever” (John 4:13).
Our consideration of the theme of transformation in Christ has now come to an end. In its course, we have measured the full meaning of the vocation that resounds in the words, sequere me. We have envisioned the countenance of “the new man who is renewed unto knowledge, according to the image of Him that created him.” We have caught a glimpse of the new supernatural beauty, that reflection of the holiness of the God-Man, which fills the “prisoners of Christ” and radiates from their souls to light up the world of mankind: “That you may declare his virtues, who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9).
We have surveyed the attitudes in which the fundamental principle of dying with Christ and rising to life with Him is unfolded. We have discussed the nature of the great assent which is the precondition, on our part, of our transformation in Christ: the assent that is to pervade, shape, and illumine our whole life until the coming of the hour that sounds the call, “Behold the bridegroom cometh: go ye forth to meet him” (Matt. 25:6); the assent sublimely expressed in the Psalmist’s prayer: “Uphold me according to. Thy word, and I shall live: and let me not be confounded in my expectation” (Ps. 118:116).
Suscipe me—receive me, O Lord, into Thy holy Law; receive me into Thy Love; receive me into Thyself. Secundum eloquium tuum—for Thou hast said, “You have not chosen me: but I have chosen you; and have appointed you, that you should go, and should bring forth fruit” (John 15:16). All my weakness, all my defeats, all the darkness in my soul fail to discourage me. I take refuge in Thy arms; I throw myself upon Thy Heart, the desire of the eternal hills. I know that Thou receivest those who give themselves to Thee wholly. Et vivam — I shall live, then: live by Thee, even Thy true divine life, to which all fullness of natural life is but a dwelling in death; the life of which Thou hast said: “This is eternal life, that they know Thee, the one true God, and Him that Thou has sent, Jesus Christ.” This is the life that I long for, the life which like a stream flows over into eternity; the everlasting, never-ceasing blissful life which is one with Thyself and Thy never-ending Love. Let me not be confounded in my hope. O Lord, salus in te sperantium, Thou hast never yet disappointed those who put their hope in Thee and deliver themselves wholly to Thee. For Thou alone, in whom is the fullness of divinity, canst fill our hearts to the full. I have heard Thy Psalmist cry out: “Taste, and see that the Lord is sweet,” I hear the voice of Thy Apostle: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Cor. 2:9). And Thou hast Thyself promised to those who follow Thee that one day they will hear Thy voice: “Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matt. 25:34). Suscipe me, Domine, secundum eloquium tuum et vivam, et nan confundas me ab exspectatione mea.