The saints do die to themselves, in the sense of being absorbed by their love of Christ, losing themselves in Christ, and only thus do they find their true selfhood—their self as intended by God.

We must give ourselves unconditionally to Christ

Our integral relationship with Christ—the Head of the Mystical Body which encompasses and sustains us, and works within us—necessarily implies, then, an express confrontation of our I with the divine Thou. True self-surrender consists in our giving ourselves to Christ absolutely, in a spirit of loving adoration; in our full renunciation of our sovereignty; in our becoming empty with regard to all other things. It means that we make no reservation whatsoever; that no province subsists in our personal world over which we still want to reign in our own right or in which we still are somehow asserting ourselves.

So long as we still draw the line somewhere in us (even though we do not expressly formulate that limitation), so long as we, however tacitly, at some point still utter a ne plus ultra which opposes a barrier to the extension of the Lord’s empire in us, we have not given ourselves to Christ in a way that is a true self-surrender. We must really push our skiff from off the shore; burn the boats behind us. The important thing is to do away with all conditions and reservations, overt or hidden. In this matter, very much is of little avail: it has to be all It is only by the totality of our surrender, the heroism—unspoilt by any proviso—of our leap in the dark, that we achieve the loss of our soul.

In true self-surrender, we experience ourselves being possessed by God

But there is one more aspect to this loss of self as implied in true self-surrender: namely, that state of being possessed which we experience when dimly aware of a power stronger than ourselves taking hold of us. In such moments we feel as though, like Habakkuk, we were taken “by the hair of our head” and lifted above ourselves.

Plato has seen—he develops it in his Phaedrus—that all great things are somehow done in a state of madness (the term meaning here, not of course a pathological condition of insanity, hut our being entranced by something greater than we are). Then we thrust off or become enchanted away, as it were, from the secure base which we have laboriously established for ourselves and on which we have built our ordinary life.

These are the moments, then, in which a great thing bursts into our life and shakes its hitherto solid framework. The firm ground on which we have formerly moved securely, able to govern and to order rationally all our affairs, is drawn from under our feet. We no longer have, as we had before, a sense of sovereignty over the situation. That is why Plato attributes a specific value to being in love: for being in love essentially implies a kind of soaring above the normal level of our life, a certain rapture.