Even on the natural plane, there is to be found a reflection of the truth of these words in the Gospel. For what determines the spiritual measure of a man, the inner wealth of his personality? Obviously, it is the degree of his awareness of values and the intensity of his adequate response to values. The more aware of values one is, and the more able to display an adequate response to every value, the more he participates in the world of values. In every act of conforming to a true value, there lies a union of our mind with this value. Yet, this conforming involves a kind of surrender: a certain detachment from our self, a certain subordination and abnegation of self.

This surrender involved in our response to values constitutes the only possible way to inward growth; it is in this way alone that we ourselves shall be endowed with values. And this surrender contains something of the losing of one’s life enjoined by Christ upon His followers. It represents, as it were, a natural prefiguring of that loss of life.

Our supernatural transformation presupposes our free surrender to God

Man is in his innermost essence specifically ordained to God. “Thou has created us for Thee” says St. Augustine (Confessions 1.1). In the measure that man submerges himself in his adoration of God, his personality becomes ampler and richer, and adorned with higher values.

Inversely, in the measure that he is concerned with his own self and the consideration enjoyed by that self, he becomes poorer, narrower, more arid, and jejune. That is why, as the example of the holy Cure d’Ars shows, even a man of scant natural gifts may develop into a great and rich personality, if only he gives himself fully and unreservedly to God; whereas, in comparison with such a man, a person who is endowed with the highest natural talents, but who shuts himself off from God, will emanate a barren and oppressive atmosphere.

To be sure, we receive supernatural life, just as the natural one, as a free gift from God’s hand, without any contribution from our part. Yet we cannot become transformed in Christ unless we lose ourselves in our vision of Christ. Only if we immerse ourselves in a loving adoration of Christ, can we be transformed in Him.

Our supernatural life will not expand automatically without our contribution. It cannot spring into full blossom unless Christ becomes for our conscious experience, too, the actual center of our life—in such a fashion that all our life is directed to Christ and is pervaded by our adoring love of Christ. For the unfolding of supernatural life, again, a self-surrendering response to value—referred, here, to God through the medium of the God-Man—constitutes an indispensable precondition.