Our confidence in God must be independent of whether we experience His nearness, whether we sense the enlivening touch of grace, whether we feel ourselves being borne on the wings of His love. Has not God too much overwhelmed us with graces to allow us to forget them even for a moment? How could our present aridity obscure the irrevocably valid proofs of God’s grace or make us doubt the primary truth that God has created us and redeemed us out of love and that there is no darkness that cannot be lit up by His light?

Confidence in God is an indispensable condition for our transformation in Christ

We have seen in this chapter that confidence in God constitutes man’s adequate response to the omnipotence, the omniscience and the charity of God, as well as to the merciful word which God has addressed to every one of us. It constitutes our central response to the God of Revelation: the response we owe to Him, together with that of love and adoration. Further, it represents an indispensable condition of our transformation in Christ.

Without confidence in God, neither our readiness to change nor our critical self-knowledge are of any avail; without confidence in God, neither true contrition nor humility are possible.

Without that basic surrender to God which implies a cheerful reliance on Him, we could never advance along the path that leads to those goals. How could we risk that leap in the dark, the act of dying unto ourselves; how should we be ready to lose our souls, unless we knew that we were not to fall into the void but to be received by the mercy of God? How might we even dare to think of putting away the old man and becoming a new man, unless we relied on the message: “This is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thess. 4:3)? How could we bear the sight of our wretchedness and weakness, and in spite of our ever-recurrent relapses keep out discouragement, unless we were certain that God’s mercy is infinite?—so that we may say with Thomas of Celano (in the Dies Irae): “Thou who hast absolved Mary and granted the thief’s prayer, hast given hope also to me.”

Confidence in God is an essential trait of holiness

Not only is confidence in God a necessary condition of our transformation in Christ; in its perfection it is itself an integrating part thereof, an essential trait of holiness. Complete, unreserved, victorious confidence in God is a fruit of Faith, Hope and Charity. It is a manifest sign of our being dead unto ourselves and living in and from God; a mark of him that has “put on the new man, who according to God is created in justice and holiness of truth” (Eph. 4:24). And from confidence in God, again, issue the triumphant freedom of the saint, and the peace of Christ, which the world cannot give us.