John the Baptist said: "He (Jesus) must increase and I must decrease." Commenting on this, Pope Benedict XVI said: "We will know God to the extent that we are set free from ourselves." In prison, John had to abandon everything for the sake of the truth he had proclaimed. In that darkness, he had only one thing to cling to, his awareness of God's love for him. Hasn't this been true down the ages? Saint after saint has traveled this road of dying to self so that Jesus may be known in and through that person. Dying to self is never easy, but only possible with the grace of God. We then come to the point we can say with Paul: "I live now, not I, but Christ in me." When our focus is Christ, we can allow him to strip us of everything that is not of him, in order to have what really matters. Death to self is the final victory of Jesus in us.