J.M.J.
Quinquagesima Sunday
St. Valentine - Priest, Martyr
BENEFICIAL PENANCE
We have a visceral dread regarding Lent. As a living oyster touched
by a drop of lemon juice, we close up tightly when our comforts are
threatened, our greatest fear being to have to give them up. We
instinctively hate all that opposes our ease.
Once we become habitually led by these instinctive reactions, our
intelligence simply fails to see that we have become slaves of our
senses. The noble faculties of our soul, intelligence and will, are
still there, but we don't give them their place.
We live in a spiritually barren time.
Is Lent really a sinister time to be endured each year, as the sad
crowning of an already extremely long and painful winter? Shouldn't
it be rather a time of joy and hope?
First of all, let us be rid of this instinctive heaviness that
brings us down to the level of animals and prevents us from rightly
appreciating the beautiful realities of our life. If we do not make
this vital effort, we will confuse joy and pleasure, hope and
satisfaction, whereas these realities are of a quite different order.
But let the idea or the desire for declaring war against pleasure as
such be far from us. Pleasure is good when it is rightly used, as a
means to obtain an end. It is the necessary means by which our
sensitive nature helps us to attain our end. Thus, we find legitimate
pleasure in eating and this pleasure leads us to sit at table, to
sustain and keep us in life. When disease visits us, our sensitive
nature withdraws into itself and we lose any appetite. The pleasure
of eating dies out, and we can even develop a violent disgust against
food. If the pleasure dies completely, we find ourselves in danger of
death and those around us must resort to artificial means to keep us
alive. Pleasure, as we see, plays an essential part in our lives: it
is necessary, but it is not an end in itself.
When, in spite of common sense, we choose to take it for an end, we
slide into madness. How could a spiritually healthy man confuse means
and end? The use of a fork is certainly an excellent means for taking
our nourishment, but not the reason of our presence at table. When
this confusion is introduced into the moral order, it is not only
madness; it becomes a sin, a voluntary insult against God and His
Love. Sin is an immeasurable disorder by which man tries to become
his own god by reversing the order of means to end. "You will be like
gods!" says the old satanic deception and, as usual, the result is not
what we expected: pleasure sought and lived as an end reduces man to a
piteous slavery and irremediably leads him away from God and His
profound joy. Man, bent under the yoke of pleasure, wanders
throughout the world, his eyes lowered, having lost any hope, looking
from now on only for the most vile realities. Slave of pleasure, it is
basically impossible for him to get out of himself and love. He is
missing the key, the notion of sacrifice.
A poor being, broken as an inarticulate puppet, he cannot - not even
for one moment - conceive of sacrificing himself for the good of
another, as he sees the world only through the deformed spectacles of
his vain satisfaction. Without sacrifice, however, there cannot be
true love, since sacrifice is the first act of love - in a sense, its
signature. Only he who loves sacrifices himself - only he who really
desires the good of his friend, even at the cost of his own comfort
and even of his own life, if that proves to be necessary; in a word,
he is ready to sacrifice his goods and to sacrifice himself.
Joy is born from this voluntarily accepted sacrifice; it is its
child of predilection. He who, in his relationship with God,
possesses this key, is stronger than the death brought by sin,
because he does not worry any more about himself, he lives on in the
higher order of charity where everything is ordered towards God. His
soul, strengthened by this invincible hope, blossoms forth in
charity.
The Lenten penance is nothing else than the expression of this joy
and this hope, in the daily exercise of mortification. Thanks to it,
we satisfy for our faults and we free ourselves from the bonds that
keep us attached to our own will and slaves of what others think of
us. Thanks to it, we shake off the yoke of our passions and
attentively and tirelessly listen to the repeated calls that God
addresses to us in the depth of our souls. Thanks to it, we give God
the homage that is due to Him, that of our profound dependence, which
is nothing but a practical act of worship.
Penance, an act of the virtue of religion, is really a benefit for
our soul. It tears the soul from the subjection to the senses and,
making it faithful to renounce itself in small things, it leads the
soul into the hope of the future good, in "the joy of its Master"!
In Christo sacerdote et Maria,
Fr. Yves le Roux
Topic: Beneficial Penance (Read 788 times)