What is required from our side so that we may share in this life of Christ? We must frequently call to mind and repeat to ourselves this truth: Christ desires to live in me, to pray, love, act and suffer in me. Then we will be ready to lay aside freely our former self with its inordinate, lower and limited desires in exchange for the desires of Christ Himself. This renunciation of our old self is of vital importance. Gradually we will come to realize the meaning of these words of St. John the Baptist: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn. 3:30). Morally speaking, it is essential to forget one’s own personality, to lose it—in the good sense of the word—for the sake of living in Christ as members in the head; in other words, we must think, desire and act with Him and in Him, in the same way as our hand moves under directions from the head.
By degrees, the spirit of Christ will take the place of our spirit—a way of thinking, feeling, judging, loving, willing, doing and suffering, a mental outlook which is extremely cramped and superficial since it is materially dependent on our physical temperament, on our heredity, on the influence of our surrounding circumstances and on the ideas of our time and locality. It is this spirit which must slowly yield ground to the spirit of Christ, to His way of looking at things, of judging, feeling, loving, acting and suffering. Only then is Christ truly living within us.
And thus we find the Saints attaining a higher self-less state in their spiritual life, a state vastly superior to that in which they possessed their own natural personality. As an example in the field of learning we can think of St. Thomas—the universal Doctor of the Church—who never speaks of himself in his works but remains completely objective; as examples in the active life there are many Saints who vividly portray the life of Christ in their actions, such as St. John Vianney. These Saints have amply fulfilled the words of St. Paul: “To live is Christ.” They alone have realized that our moral personality cannot be brought to its full perfection unless it is in some way lost in the person of Christ, just as a river only reaches its term when it flows into the sea. Consequently, the Saints have substituted for their own ideas and judgments the judgments of Christ accepted on faith; their own will has made way for the holy will of Christ, and their own activity for His sanctifying activity. In this way they have become God’s servants in the fullest sense of the word, just as our hand is the servant of the will. And so St. Paul could say: “And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20). St. John Chrysostom said that the heart of Paul was the heart of Christ….
We must offer ourselves to Him, so that He may live in us His own divine life which far surpasses our own. Thus, when we pray, we must unite ourselves to the powerful prayer of Christ, so that our prayer then becomes, so to speak, an extension or continuation of Christ’s prayer.
If we adopt this way of life, our soul will not merely become more perfect but will also surrender itself completely so as to live in utter self-forgetfulness. It will then appreciate Christ’s invitation to so many of the Saints: “Allow me to live in you, while you die to yourself.” That was the way followed by St. Benedict, St. Francis, St. Dominic, St. Vincent de Paul; these obtained the true freedom of the sons of God.
(Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., The Priest in Union with Christ, p. 35-36; available from TAN Books; published with permission.)
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