Our Lady's Message: Prayer and Penance

Since the Fall of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, pain and suffering have been part of every person’s earthly life. Yet there are certain moments in human history that seem darker than the rest, as if all of humanity were racing toward the edge of a cliff. While history will tell whether we are experiencing one of those times now, there is no question that the pain and suffering of our day is, in many ways, unprecedented. During the month of October, it is good to once again remember what we have been told repeatedly by our Lady when she has appeared in our troubled past – as followers of Christ, we are called to undertake penance and prayer.

The specific prayer recommended time and again by Our Lady is the Holy Rosary. We have written before about praying the Rosary, this most beautiful prayer of our Lady that guides us to meditate on the Gospel and leads us to her Son and our Savior Jesus. It is a prayer that changes hearts and lives as it calls down God’s grace and transforms us as it keeps us under the protective mantle of our Blessed Mother. During October, the month devoted to the Holy Rosary, we invite you to join us in renewing a commitment to this prayer.

But what about penance, the other side of this coin? If all is mercy and we are forgiven, why does God require penance?

Most of us approach penance from the wrong direction. We hear “penance” and we immediately equate it with a disagreeable hardship, something we endure for a time, like giving up chocolate Lent, or something we are told to do by the priest in confession. So, we add “penance” to a to-do list and… Check! Done! Now we can move on to something more pleasurable. But that’s not exactly what God meant when He said “take up your cross”, and it’s not how the Church and saints understand penance. As Dom Hubert van Zeller points out in his book, “Approach to Penance”, these may be acts of penance, and are indeed often a good place to start, but true penance goes much deeper than that.

True penance demands a complete surrender of self to the will of God. Penance that is worth anything is not simply a turning from something, but it is a turning to Someone.

Often our acts of penance are inspired by feelings of remorse. We recognize we did something wrong or are overly attached to something (or someone) and we are remorseful. Yet, true penance does not stop at remorse – it must go forward to trust. It is this confusion of remorse and penance that leads to seeing penance as only external acts to be performed instead of a habitual disposition of the soul – a virtue – to be cultivated. Penance as a virtue begins in humility - in acknowledging that God is all and compared to God we are nothing - AND it goes further to have complete confidence and trust in God’s loving mercy.

Why does this matter? Because everyone is called to penance, but not everyone is called to perform the heroic acts of penance we often read about in the lives of the saints. Dom Hubert van Zeller warns us that if we approach penance as only acts to be performed, then we risk falling into one of two errors.

First, we may avoid true penance all together. We say to God, “I’ll give this, but not that”, which means we haven’t really given our whole selves to Him. We can also fall into pride by going down our list of sacrifices and congratulating ourselves at how much we’ve given God. In both cases, the emphasis is on the “I”. It is much better to say, “God, here I am. Take whatever, whenever, however You want.” And then trust that He will give you the grace and strength you will need when He takes you at your word.

The second error we can fall into is to have the desire to deny ourselves, but to be disillusioned because we can’t do as much as the saints, or even perhaps other individuals we know – we aren’t strong enough, or our vocations don’t allow us to perform such heroic acts of penance. Yet penance as a virtue means that the merit of the act is based on the intention of the will. It is the denial of self that is the substance of true penance.

Remember what Jesus said about the poor woman who gave two coins in the collection - she gave more than all the others who came before her because she gave from her poverty; she gave all she had to give. That is all Jesus asks of us - to willingly give all, whether that means two coins or 20 coins doesn’t matter to Him, as long as it is everything.

If we have the desire to give ourselves to God through penance - whether to atone for our own sins or in reparation for the sins of others - it is because God has first instilled in us that desire. This should give us greater faith and hope in Him, because along with the desire, He will give us the grace - Jesus Himself will help us - to complete the gift. Yet we must keep in mind that penance is the way of the cross. It is the way of love, to be sure, but it is also that way of faith and it is a work. In picking up the cross - in developing the virtue of penance - our sole motive should be to please God. We must also realize that we will be called to bear the cross in a shape we didn’t bargain for and that the really effective part is not what we do by way of self-denial but what God does in us by way of reproducing Jesus’ Passion in our everyday lives.

This is why humility and trust is so important - because when Jesus gives us a small part of His cross, or a thorn from His crown, or a share in the wounds He received under the lash, or the humiliation of being despised and ridiculed by others, He is asking us to join Him in His supreme gift of love. We cannot love Jesus completely if we do not also love what He loves, and He loved the cross. Not because he loves pain and suffering itself, but because He loves the Father’s will and He loves us and it is the cross that bridges the way between Him and us.

So how do we put all this into practice? How do we know what specific acts of penance God may be asking us to undertake to cultivate the virtue of penance in our souls?

Only grace will reveal what specifically we are to do, how we are to do it, and when or for how long. God speaks to us in many ways; here are some tips for discerning God’s voice:

• Read the Scriptures and the Catechism to learn more about what God and the Church teaches us about prayer and penance.

• Find out what the Pope and our bishops are asking us to do (i.e., are they asking the faithful to engage in specific prayers or acts of penance, such as fast days?).

• Seek counsel from a wise confessor or spiritual director. This is especially important before taking on more rigorous acts of penance. Remember, God prefers obedience to sacrifice.

• Consider your current disposition (i.e., temperament, health, etc.), vocation, and circumstances. God will not call us to take on crosses that are truly beyond our strength or in conflict with fulfilling our vocations (though, admittedly at first, it may feel like it!).

• Spend time in prayer and ask God for direction, then listen to what He speaks in your heart. And if you feel a nudge that doesn’t go away, take that seriously. Again, because we are approaching penance as a virtue and total gift of self, our prayer to God is not, “God what more can I give you today?” because, if we have truly given Him everything, we cannot give Him “more”. Rather, our prayer becomes, “God, I’ve given you all of me and with the help of your grace, I renew that gift of self. What would you have me do today?”

Finally, because penance is a virtue to be cultivated, it will take time and practice to grow strong in it. So, when we stumble, remember Jesus also fell under the weight of the cross - offer your weakness to Him with confidence, ask for the help of our Blessed Mother, rise and press forward once more. For the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

Ashes, Dust and Love

Penance. Suffering. Ashes and dust. It’s that time of liturgical year again. It’s Ash Wednesday. The beginning of Lent. Many of us have a love/hate relationship with this penitential season. We enter into with different levels of commitment. Some of us get pretty creative in our fast and penitential practices to ease into it and slide through. After all, it is innate in us to avoid suffering and seek pleasure. Yet, there is something about the season of Lent that speaks to us on a deeper, more profound level. We NEED it, even if we aren’t sure exactly what to do or how to go about getting the most spiritually out of the season. So, often it stretches before us, six weeks of purple.

So what is the season of Lent about? Is it merely to inflict pain and punishment, to make us feel bad about ourselves and our sins? To bring gloom and doom down on us as we are reminded “you are dust, and to dust you shall return”? Certainly if we were a people without faith in a God of mercy and love, without hope for life with Him in heaven, then Lent would indeed be very dark. But we are ultimately an Easter people, a people of joy and hope and love. Nonetheless, to fully live Easter, we must walk through the passion and death of Christ Jesus, precisely because of sin.

In the creation of Adam and Eve, God made man unique. While we have bodies like the animals, we also have a reason and a will – we are rational creatures. And God gave humans a gift – so long as the mind of man remembered who He was (a creation of God) and remained obedient to Him, then the lower powers of man (his bodily senses and passions) would remain subject to his will and death would be foreign to us. But when Adam and Eve saw the forbidden fruit was good for food, pleasing to the eye, and desirable for wisdom, then took the fruit and ate it, they grabbed at God’s place – they rebelled against the order of creation. Now the carnal appetite of humankind rebels against the spirit and death is the result. Our reason is darkened, our bodies and passions often seek to assert themselves against what we otherwise would will. The forbidden fruit seemed good as food – now we are prone to sins of the flesh (gluttony, lust, sloth). The forbidden fruit was pleasing to the eye – now we are prey to lust of the eyes (greed and envy). And the forbidden fruit was desirable for wisdom – now we puff ourselves up with pride and vainglory and seek to dominate others through wrath.

Fast forward to Jesus. Immediately after Jesus’ baptism, the Holy Spirit drove Him into the desert for forty days and nights – a time of prayer and fasting. It was in the desert that Jesus was tempted by Satan to sin. In His responses to Satan, Jesus shows us how to respond in freedom. Jesus was tempted to turn stones into bread and satisfy His fleshly hunger. He responds, “Man does not live by bread alone.” Jesus was taken to the top of the temple and told to prove He was to Son of God by jumping off – after all, God promised to catch Him (Satan even quotes Scripture in this temptation). But this was a temptation to pride. Jesus answers with humility – “you shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.” Finally, Jesus was led to a mountaintop and shown the world – it would all be His, if He would just do homage to Satan – a temptation to grab power and possessions, so pleasing to the eye. But at what cost? Jesus says, “Get away, Satan! It is written: The Lord, your God, shall you worship and Him alone shall you serve.”

In the practice of prayer, we are reminded that God is “He who is” and we are those who are not. That is to say, as we grow in relationship with God through prayer, we come to see more clearly the truth about God and ourselves. We grow in humility, charity, and all the virtues as He pours His grace out upon us. But we have to open ourselves up to Him and we do this through prayer.

Through the practice of fasting, penance and mortifications, we bring the body and passions back into subjection to our reason and will. Like a spoiled child that has to be disciplined and trained, our senses, carnal desires and passions need to be purified and brought back into right order. Of course, we can only do this with God’s grace. We are also reminded how weak and helpless we are apart from God. We cannot rely on our own strength – though we work and strive as if it all depends on us, we pray for God’s help and abandon ourselves to Him as if it all depends on Him.

Finally, though almsgiving, that is, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, we become detached from the things of this world and freed from the sins of greed and envy. We stop worrying about what tomorrow will bring because we learn to trust God’s providence, while at the same time growing in charity toward our neighbors.

Lent is not about punishing ourselves. It is not God’s intent that we simply suffer, as if that were the goal in itself. In St. Catherine’s Dialogue, she repeatedly records God telling her that suffering is NOT a proper goal. Prayer, penitential acts and works of mercy are only worth anything at all because they spring from, are rooted in, and lead to love. So if our Lenten practices are not leading us deeper in relationship with God, helping us do good and avoid sin – in a nutshell, aiding us to more perfectly keep the commands to love God and neighbor – then we need to go back, reassess and adjust our practices.

So, how do your practices of prayer, penance and almsgiving help you love God and neighbor? How can we grow in holiness this Lent? How can we better prepare ourselves to welcome Jesus, like a bride greeting her beloved, on Easter morning?