The great secret for leading [a] free, pure and already
almost superhuman Christian life ... is not so much to consider the vanity of
this world, the fragility and baseness of this present life, our own personal
misery and passions, all those evils into which, without the help of grace, we
should so easily fall, and our faults and sins, which we ought, however, to
hate and deplore. All that is useful, all that is indispensable; everyone who
is wise will remember and think of it at certain hours; but it is not always
the hour for thinking of it, and it is not, at all events, what is the most
efficacious for us.
What is most efficacious, here as everywhere, the most
decisive, the most triumphant, is, as far as one can, and habitually, to look
upwards; it is to consider God and Jesus; the perfections of God, His rights,
His attributes, His appeals, His provocations, His patient waiting, His
designs, His promises; the mysteries of Jesus and the divine graces flowing
from what he said, did, ordained and suffered. It is ever to remember that He
is personally the point of departure and the Chief of the Christian life; that
the great virtue of baptism is to incorporate us in Him, to give us His life,
to make us of His race, and to pour forth His Spirit within us, that is to say
a light and a strength whereby we are enabled, and so remain, not only to avoid
sin, as St John expressly says, but moreover to judge all things, to discern
our way and to follow it, and ascending from light to light, from liberty to
liberty, to reach the inward state of him who said: “I live, now not I; but
Christ lives in me.”
~ Mgr Charles Gay in Elevations upon the Life and
Doctrine of our Lord Jesus Christ [quoted in Blessed Dom Columba Marmion,
O.S.B., Christ in His Mysteries]
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