The Great Secret

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]