Death Through Passivity.

Here we must be most careful to distinguish the two phases in the implementing, in the world around us, of the will of God: in other words, in the animation of secondary causes by the influx of the universal Christ.
In itself, and directly, our bondage to the world particularly those forms of it that irk us, that diminish us, that kill us is not divine, nor is it in any way willed by God.
It represents that portion of incompleteness and disorder which mars a creation that is still imperfectly unified.
In so far as they are such, these forms of bondage are displeasing to God: and in a first stage, God fights with us and in us against them.
One day he will triumph; but, because the duration of our individual lives is out of all proportion to the slow evolution of the total Christ, it is inevitable that we shall never during our time on earth, see the final victory.
Almost every moment brings another check to our effort to grow, undermines it and sooner or later we shall all experience decline and death.
Christ, never the less can never be overcome. If then we ask how the almighty power, which is his in virtue of his cosmic function, of saving and beatifying the elements of his Body in growth, will in some way re-establish itself, the answer is that it will do so by a remarkable transformation.
The Incarnate Word masters the limitations and diminishments that the general progress of the cosmos does not allow him to remove in the same way as a skilful sculptor masters the short comings of his marble, by integrating them though without changing them in a higher spiritualization of our beings.
That is why when we have fought to the bitter end to develop ourselves and win through, and find ourselves halted, beaten, by forces of the world, then if we believe, the power with which we clash so agonizingly suddenly ceases to be a blind or evil energy.
Hostile matter vanishes. And in its place, we find the divine Master of the world who under the species and appearance of each and every event, moulds us, empties us of our self-love, and penetrates into us.