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.”

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.