By Stephen Beale, Catholic Exchange - In The City of God, St. Augustine says humility is the way to heaven. Christ showed us the way by ‘humbling himself, even to the point of death on a cross’ (to paraphrase Philippians 2:8). The Incarnation prefigures the Passion. Indeed, as another writer on this site recently put it, “It was not so much that His birth cast a shadow on His life, and thus led to His death; it was rather that the Cross was there from the beginning, and it cast its shadow backward to His birth.”