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.”