All height, width, and depth, all greatness and beauty of humility, with its irresistible victorious power, shine forth most luminously in the Blessed Virgin, the Queen of the angels and all saints. In humility there is mirrored the central mystery of the process of our transformation—the mystery that Our Lord has put into these words: “Unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die, itself remaineth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). The path that leads man to his ultimate union with Christ is not the unfolding of his natural powers and of the wealth of his gifts but his radical renunciation of self-assertion, the relinquishment and mortification of the self: “He who loses his soul shall win it.”

Thus, yearning to be transformed in Christ, we must pray: Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our hearts like unto Thine.

8. Confidence in God

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Confidence in God

THE knowledge of our need of redemption, as we have seen in the beginning, is the prime condition of our transformation in Christ, for it provides the only possible basis for our readiness to change.

We must have confidence in the whole message of love in the Gospels

However, that knowledge is condemned to sterility unless it is completed by another fundamental act on our part: our confidence in God. The knowledge that we are in need of redemption would merely cast us into despair unless we also knew that it is God’s will to redeem us. Even under the Old Covenant, man’s awareness of the necessity of redemption was qualified by his expectation of the promised Messiah.

To us, however, more is given: the faith that Christ has redeemed us, that the merciful love of God bends down to us; the faith that God wills to purify and to sanctify us and to fill us with His holy life; the faith that Baptism infuses a new supernatural life into us; and the faith that we are called by God, and that—though it be an incomprehensible mystery, since He, who rests in absolute beatitude, in no wise needs us—God seeks us in love and wills to be loved by us. In a word, we have been given Faith embracing the entire message of the holy Gospels. Confidence in God implies this living faith in the whole message of the Gospel; a faith that is no mere theoretical belief in an objective truth but a vital creed, by whose agency a superior Reality is continually at work informing our lives.

We must trust in the omnipotence of God