This liberating power of a high value or a deep experience is most strikingly manifested whenever a person’s heart is inflamed with a noble passion of love. At one blow, what has been his habitual world breaks down. It is this which finds its plastic expression in the first act of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, when, having drunk the philter, Tristan cries out of his “dream ill-omened of Tristan’s honor.” All the world of outward honor and renown suddenly appears so sunk into immateriality that he is no longer able even to recall its meaning. In this sense, again, he refers in the second act to himself and Isolde as being “enveloped by night.”

With the surge of this great love, which lifts them both into a new and higher world, a new principle of value has entered into their lives, in the sight of which all things that peopled their former “day-worlds” are condemned to evanescence. These things do not fit into their new “night-world.” As lovers they have acquired a new simplicity.

We must consciously yield to the elevating power of values

Of such deep experiences we must make the most so as to detach ourselves from transient goods. We must seize the offer of God contained in that gift-like descent upon us of a high value, and, yielding to its attraction, ascend to a new point of vantage, where we shall be past many things which have previously confined us within the zone of the petty. We must not resist this shattering of a more trivial world where we have found a snug and cozy home for our everyday existence. We must evince a perpetual and alert willingness to follow this upward pull instead of fearfully and slothfully barricading our hearts against it. “Today if you shall hear his voice, harden not your hearts” (Ps. 94:8).

It does not suffice to accept that detachment from lower and more irrelevant things as a gift; we must actively cooperate with it, and assent to it once for all. Otherwise, the effect of that deep experience towards making us free and simple will be confined to its actual duration, as of a psychic episode. Above all, whenever a high human good exercises its releasing effect upon us, we must consciously evoke and experience its manifold relations to God, in order that it may lead us before the face of God. That elevation above petty terrestrial goods must take root in our soul as a permanent attitude of sursum corda, of eagerness to let ourselves be borne aloft to God.

If, invoking Jesus’ assistance and imitating His example, we undergo these experiences in a spirit that enables us to penetrate not merely into the specific content of the high goods in question but into the very presence of the “Father of all lights” (a condition for fully comprehending that specific content itself), then all these experiences will become milestones along our path to true simplicity. Every such gift placed in our lives by God entails an obligation for us to change, to soar upwards, to extricate ourselves from certain meshes, and to acquire greater freedom for God.