Trusting in God

Once again I want to reiterate that every Christian should read "The Lord". Since I last blogged I've read so much that I won't have the time to write about.

In the chapter "Belief in Christ, Imitation of Christ" Guardini talks about a transposition of values. At chapter's end he talks about the intellectual life of those who continue to believe only in themselves. The task of the Christian is to achieve "an ever more complete exchange of natural security, self-confidence, and self-righteousness, for confidence in God and his righteousness as it is voiced by Christ and the succession of his apostles".

Then he talks about what happens to the man that doesn't make this transposition. He describes perfectly how I found myself before I rediscovered the Faith; in fact he describes the fate of all those who find themselves alone without God, like Dante in the first cantos of "The Inferno". Guardini:

Until a man makes this transposition he will have no peace. He will realize how the years of his life unroll, and ask himself vainly what remains. He will make moral efforts to improve, only to become either hopelessly perplexed or priggish. He will work, only to discover that nothing he can do stills his heart. He will study, only to progress little beyond vague probabilities -- unless his intellectual watchfulness slackens, and he begins to accept possibility for truth or wishes for reality. He will fight, found, form this and that only to discover that millions have done the same before him and millions will continue after he is gone, without shaping the constantly running sand for more than an instant. He will explore religion, only to founder in the questionableness of all he finds. The world is an entity. Everything in it conditions everything else. Everything is transitory. No single thing helps, because the world as a whole has fallen from grace. One quest alone has an absolute sense: that of the Archimedes-point and lever which can lift the world back to God, and these are what Christ came to give.
(Guardini, p346)

Only Christ gives us the grace and the light to find our way out of this morass. Compare the above passage to the first canto in "The Inferno":

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.
(Dante, Inferno Canto 1, lines 1-12)

The forest where Dante found himself is the same moral and intellectual swamp that Guardini describes. We are made in God's image and likeness; only Christ -- God that brought himself down to man's level -- can bring us to realize what that means and give us the grace to grow in his image. Only the Church gives us the foundations to accept all the world offers and remain strong in the Faith and true to ourselves.