Then all conventional points of view suddenly fade into insignificance, all our little attachments and shackles of habit—all that we otherwise make so much fuss about and are so unwilling to dispense with—fall from us as if by magic. Then no disorder arises, but on the contrary, all real values become more clearly visible, and are seen even more deeply in their mutual harmony. Everything thus moves into its proper place and manifests the true order of things in conspectu Dei—whereas, when we are enslaved by a mere passion, we see all our world plunged into confusion and disorder.

Again, it is a proof of our basic decision to become a new man in Christ: to cast from us uncompromisingly everything that cannot maintain itself before the face of Christ or is somehow out of keeping with this new life in Christ, no matter how pleasant and familiar it has been to us as an appurtenance of our accustomed life—when we experience a legitimate state of being possessed as a joy-bearing gift; when we yearn to lose ourselves in Christ and say with the Bride of the Canticle of Canticles: “Stay me up with flowers, compass me about with apples; because I languish with love” (Song of Sol. 2:5).

Reference must be made to another dimension of the loss of self, an entirely new one which is confined to the mystic states of mind. The inward death depicted by St. John of the Cross in his Dark Night far exceeds that dying to oneself which we have met with as an aspect of our transformation in Christ. It amounts to a dying of the soul comparable to the experience of being immersed in complete darkness—a negative prefiguration and token of our future total rebirth in Christ. Here, the concept of losing one’s self acquires a greatly enhanced, a very much more literal meaning. The life in Christ which grows out of that surrender implies an immediate experience of Christ, a sensing of the fact St. Paul describes in these words, “I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me.”

This supreme aspect of our transformation in Christ, a classic treatment of which can be found in the writings of many mystics, particularly of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, does not enter into the scope of the present work. It suffices to remark that this phase of man’s transformation in Christ, too, constitutes an essential aspect, in a sense, the crowning aspect of the Vocation expressed in these words of the Lord: “But he that shall drink of the water that I will give him shall not thirst forever” (John 4:13).