Postscript: Forget About ‘Being A Saint’

In the [highest] stage, surrender is much more radical and ‘total’ than in [earlier stages]. There I refrained from choosing for myself what I would do. I tried to discover God’s will and then carry it out, but it was I who did God’s will. Now I offer to God not only my will but also all of my potential, all of the powers of my soul, so that he himself may carry out his will through me. Before, it was I who played the violin. It was God, of course, who gave me the score, and I obediently played what he gave me to play. Now I give the violin to God and let him play. One hears that it is the same violin. It has the same characteristics and defects. But there is no similarity between the music I produced myself and what resonates now. God not only makes use of all of the violin’s possibilities, but he reveals something of himself in his playing. It is not that I have become more skilled. No, now an artist of the very highest grade is playing.

Being God’s violin is something completely different from playing the violin for God. Now he does not content himself with deciding what I should play, but he himself touches the strings of my faculties. He can do that only when he has the violin in his hands, when my surrender applies, not just to one part of myself, but to my whole self. (Into Your Hands, Father)