THE BEST LENTEN PENANCE
What are you giving up this year for Lent? In previous years I’ve denied myself ice cream, chocolate, coffee… the “usual.” This year, I’m feeling that it’s time for a real challenge. How about giving up smack-talk, even when people deserve it? How about giving up being impatient with idiot drivers? How about giving up creature comforts even after a long day when I think I deserve it?
I feel like I’m missing the point. Why do we do penance, fast, and “give things up” during Lent? I’ve written before in this bulletin that fasting is a stellar training ground for holiness! Penance is exercising our spiritual muscle of selflessness, self-control, moderation, love, and humility. Self-denial teaches us to strengthen our WILL over our desires. (If we don’t have enough will power to resist a Hinkley’s Donut, how will we ever have the willpower to pick up our cross and follow Jesus?)
When we choose our own penance for Lent, we tend to go too easy on ourselves. (I think I’ll give up watching football during Lent.) Or we do the opposite extreme: we push for heroic virtue that sets us up for failure. (I think I’ll go without sleep during Lent and use all that time to pray the Rosary.) Our motives can be mixed: maybe we are trying to be spiritual show-offs. Maybe we suffer from vanity, thinking we can power through on our own willpower. Maybe competitiveness and comparison are our drive.
Here is an amazing thought that comes to us from the Little Flower, St. Thérese of Lisieux. She wasn’t writing about specifically Lenten penances but preparing herself to enter the convent. “My mortifications,” she writes, “consisted in breaking my will, always so ready to impose itself on others, in holding back a reply, in rendering little services without any recognition, in not leaning my back against a support when seated, etc.”
Perhaps the best penance and fasting is not to choose some random delight to forego, but may be to accept what God brings to us. I’ve decided for this Lent to let HIM choose my penance every day with the overall goal to get MY WILL into alignment with HIS WILL. In a Catholic classic from the late 1950’s called Approach to Penance, Fr. Van Zeller, suggests that the best penance is “wholly a matter of submitting to what God sends…”
Ouch. In other words, pick up your cross daily. And follow him. Far too often, I pick up my cross and gripe and complain. I focus on the discomfort; I am cursing the cross and never embracing it as a way to new life. I get so focused on the suffering it’s almost like I’m following THE CROSS rather than Jesus. Jesus says to take our eyes off the cross and follow him. Focus on HIM. We are to pick up our cross, embrace it as an opportunity, and let him lead us to resurrection. So that’s what I’m working on for Lent: submitting to what God sends every moment of the day and letting Jesus show me the way. HE does all the heavy lifting. He is the one that carries US. All the love and patience always comes from him. We have to shift our gaze from the cross to the Christ.
How might this look for you? If you are a mother with several kiddos who demand you to give every ounce of your time and energy in non-stop self-gift, if you are pushed to the limit of exhaustion and get very little for your own needs, you really do not need to add some sort of self denial of dessert during Lent. How about if you except the hourly demands by totally surrendering to Jesus? What if the penance was to pray to do everything with genuine joy, patience, and the kind of love that only comes from God? Every negative is met by a positive. Every squeal is met by a tender voice of sweetness. Every defiance is met by patient love.
If you have a taxing, stressful job situation with difficult people and high demands, you do not need to forgo coffee as a way to build virtue and engage a season of penance. How about if you pray for each difficult person that they will encounter the living Lord? You could ask Jesus to see through his eyes and have empathy and compassion for this person. Pray that your first response to every stressor is to offer it to Jesus. You could do little acts of kindness to soften hardened hearts and meet every conflict with words of affirmation and hope.
If you struggle with chronic pain, debilitating health conditions, depression, or other physical issues that are a part of every hour of every day, you do not need to add little self-imposed crosses to your daily cross. How about offering that pain to Jesus to take away the pain from some one else? Or maybe unite your suffering to his agony in the garden and console Jesus to alleviate a little of his agony. Use the time you are incapacitated and unable to function to pray for specific people, world events, the renewal of the Church, or the spread of the Gospel. You could take every moment where despair wants to consume you and choose to spend that time just loving God the Father and letting Him love you.
Fr. Van Zeller writes about the trials that come across our path each day with intensity of spiritual battles, temptations, discomforts, and struggles, and when we truly try to respond through the Holy Spirit, that we then experience “the greater penance and stronger faith required to meet it.”
So, this Lent, I’m going to try and let every response be a holy response. I’m not going to fast
from little things that bring me a little joy, instead, I’m going to try to offer every moment to Jesus first. Then ask him how I can be more like him. I’ll be praying for you all this Lent with every bite of dark chocolate, cup of coffee, and bowl of ice cream!