In defiance of all his sins and all the darkness in him, he will say with St. Thomas Aquinas: “O Loving Pelican, Lord Jesus, wash me clean in Thy blood.” He knows that he can accomplish nothing through his own power but everything in Christ.

Not by his own force shall he span the abyss that yawns between him and God: Christ shall carry him over, if he is willing to follow Him without reserve. By His light, there is no darkness that cannot be dispelled, nay, even changed into radiating brightness. “Darkness shall not be dark to Thee, and night shall be light as the day” (Ps. 138:12).

We must strive continually for self-knowledge

True self-knowledge is an ineluctable necessity for him who desires to be transformed in Christ. He must be filled with a real thirst for securing, in conspectu Dei, an accurate notion of himself, such as he is; he must endeavor to get rid of all illusions of complacency, and to detect his particular vices and weaknesses. He must conform to the summons of St. Catherine of Siena, “Let us enter into the cell of our self-knowledge.” But he must not believe that self-knowledge is easy of attainment, nor that—once he forms the desire for self-knowledge—all his defects will reveal themselves to him in due course. With a healthy distrust of himself, he should continue supposing that he is still entangled in a mesh of illusions, and pray: “Cleanse me of my hidden weaknesses.”

Obedience to his spiritual director or his religious superior, above all, is destined to guide him towards the acquisition of genuine self-knowledge and the freedom implied therein. He must be aware of the fact that in order to obtain a faithful portrait of himself he needs the help of others. He must remember the words of the Lord about the mote in our brother’s eye and the beam in our own; and admit that, trusting his own lights without proper guidance, he will remain a thrall to this blindness of fallen man concerning himself. That is why he cannot dispense with the more objective vision of a spiritual director, of a religious superior, of any friend of great wisdom and piety. Yet, much as he depends—in order to attain a true knowledge of his character—on the help of God and on that of his fellow men, one thing he must contribute himself: the unreserved determination of dying unto himself and becoming a new man in Christ, and the strong desire, proceeding therefrom, to see himself as he really is. That desire will impel him to pray: “Lord, that I may see” (Luke 18:41).

4

True Consciousness

THE inward progress in the Christian’s life is linked to a process of awakening to an ever increasing degree of consciousness. Conversion itself is comparable to an emergence from a state of somnolence. In rising from self-contained worldliness towards the reality of God, in experiencing the metaphysical situation in which God has placed him and the new light in which all things and his own self are now appearing, the person attains to a new level of consciousness. The convert, in Cardinal Newman’s words, is like a man ascending from a mine to behold daylight for the first time. He looks back upon his former life as a state of somnolence, a twilight of semiconsciousness.