Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [227]
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