Charity as the Basis and Source of the Spirituality of the Religious Life 77 verb resignare. On the path of striving for supernatural love, this virtue stands out as a characteristic manifestation of progress in the spiritual life, while possessing this virtue is an indispensable condition for following Christ. In a way, resignatio is the entrance room to perfect love and a crossing over from everything that is considered as “pleasant,” “good,” along the lines of human “preferences.” In this aspect, Papczyński’s commentary in his Inspectio cordis on the transfiguration on Mount Tabor is of great significance. Taking as a starting point the words of Peter (“It is good for us to be here” (Mt 17:4), he states: “it is good for us, O Lord, to be here; it is good to seek delight and to rest solely in your delight. It is good to come to you frequently and to enjoy your consolations. But it is better to be resigned; it is best to suffer on account of your love.”144 In a certain sense, the virtue of resignation (spiritual detachment/surrender) is a result of choosing God unreservedly and His interests in complete reliance and entrustment to Him. It is also a sign of some sort of reconciliation in a spirit of faith and complete trust in God with the state of things, into which a religious person is brought by God out of His love, true and difficult to comprehend (because it is Divine). Without this fascination with God’s love, resignation would be only an image of acedii or idleness mixed with spiritual apathy. The Marian Founder has in mind some kind of resignation from everything other than God and His love achieved together with a simultaneous re-prioritization of basic human aspirations in order to focus more fully on God, the ultimate and most important goal of human life. Only from that perspective and thanks to that kind of experience of the faith can such a prioritization of things and human aspirations be achieved, Derville, Résignation, in: DSAM, t. 13, Paris 1988, col. 413-415. 144 In view of the significance of the quoted passage, it is worth having it here in its original language: “‘Bonum est nos hic esse.’ En quanto desiderio Apostolorum Princeps tenetur Thabo reio in culmine commorandi, quin manendi: in quo aliquid gloriae caelestis, mente, oculisque hauserat. O si tu, qui ipsum totius gloriae Regem totum suscepisti, eundem affectum elicias: BONUM est nos, Domine, hic esse; bonum est in tuo solummodo beneplacito voluptatem quaerere, et quiescere. Bonum est te frequenter adire, et frui tuis consolationibus; ast melius esse resignatum; optimum tui amore pati,” Second Sunday of Lent, BHC, pt. 3 (IC critical edition, p. 66).
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