We ought to aim at the toughest penances, I believe. But we ought to remember two things. God has put the best ones right in front of our noses—if only we’ll accept the grace to see them and thank God in the midst of them.

What ought I to do for extra penance in Lent? It’s a question many ask themselves. Fortunately, the best kind of penances, all spiritual writers seem to agree, are the penances that are passive. They are the ones God has chosen for us. Dom Hubert Van Zeller, in his 1958 classic Approach to Penance, tells us that while taking on active penances, especially those dealing with the externals of our life, is something that might need some guidance, “passive penance is wholly a matter of submitting to what God sends, so requires almost no practical guidance.”

While the term “passive” makes it sound as if we are simply sitting there, this only means that God has taken the initiative in giving us our crosses. You have to be spiritually active to really gain from passive penance. Van Zeller said that we must be “willing, yielding positively, being very much alive.”

That can be a trick. But it’s also good news in particular for the old, the sick, the poor, and the weak, for whom an active penance, such as rigorous fasting or long prayer vigils on the knees or donating great sums of money or physical service to others is imprudent or even impossible. We are doing what God wants most when we submit to the difficult realities in our lives that range from being tired, sick, or sleepless to uncomfortable, bored, or depressed.

Van Zeller writes, “The more interior the faculty and intense its appetite, the greater the penance and the stronger the faith required to meet it.”  He lists trials of the intellect such as feeling difficulty with faith or sure of how weak our own judgment is. He lists trials of our will such as not receiving affection back from those to whom we’ve given it—instead receiving “indifference or ingratitude or misunderstanding.” He lists trials of our memory such as the realization of opportunities that we’ve passed by and “resentful regret.” And then there are the trials to our imagination that include “temptations and dreads” that tend to obsess us.

All of these things are given by God insofar as he allows them to happen to us. What is called for with all of them is not a mere stoicism involving a stiff upper lip or clenched teeth but to see them, while not denying their difficulty, as opportunities to praise the Lord in the midst of the dark, to serve him, and to participate in the work that Christ himself did in his earthly ministry. We don’t need to deny that such sufferings are crosses or put on a false smile. When complaining of a burden in her life, St. Teresa of Avila heard the Lord say to her that this is how he treated all his friends. She famously replied, “If this is how you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few.” But she understood in the depths of her heart that such crosses were really her own participation in Jesus’ own cross.

Depending on our own lives, it may well be that passive penance is enough even for Lent. Those whose lives are turned upside down by disease, poverty, or various other troubles may be in situations that seem impossible but that are also the opportunity for God to work what may have seemed like impossible changes in our own hearts. Those afflicted with Irish Alzheimers, the condition in which all is forgotten but grudges, may be given soft hearts even as they are given more opportunities for grudges. Those who have suffered from a child wandering spiritually and morally may suddenly be given a glimpse into the heart of the Father. Those who have really placed their identity in their work or their usefulness or their capacity to give might be given in an experience of sickness or joblessness an insight into who they really are.

Yet many of us realize that though we’ve got it bad in certain ways, we haven’t got it that bad. Active penances, those practices taken on to trim our souls overgrown with certain weeds, may have dangers attached to them such as mixed motives, vanity, and the desire to compete with others (I’ll show her who’s really humble!). But many times such acts of deliberately, actively surrendering our time, our money, our physical or our social comfort promise goods that we sense God wants us to pursue. Van Zeller gives a good rule: “it is always better to attempt a good in spite of its risks than to draw back from a risk in spite of its opportunities.” As he notes, such temptations as “low motives” for the good we do give us a chance to mortify ourselves.

So what kind of penances should we aim at? It might well be good to ask God that question so that we can make even our active penances have a bit of passivity in them. But the rule is that the best penances to be taken on are those which contradict our own wills—and thus remind us that what we want is not nearly as important as what God wants. St. Thése of Lisieux gives some very good and very simple ideas in her Story of a Soul. On the brink of entering the Carmelite convent, she recounts, she initially thought she should relax a bit before entering on such a rigorous life. She thought better, however, realizing that the resolution to which God was calling her for the three months she had to wait was “a serious and mortified life.”

So what did she do? Hair shirts? Pilgrimages on her knees? All-night prayers? Severe fasts? Other acts of Serious Penance? Not at all, she says. Though she says this was probably due to her own “cowardliness,” I think she had realized what the toughest penances are.  “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., etc.”

As a perpetual sloucher, that refusal to use a back support sounds to me like carrying a full-sized cross. But it is nothing compared to the other two—especially the first. How often do our replies to others, even on serious matters of Christian truth, involve a great deal of our own wounded self-love or a need to show who is the expert?

We ought to aim at the toughest penances, I believe. But we ought to remember two things. God has put the best ones right in front of our noses—if only we’ll accept the grace to see them and thank God in the midst of them. And for those we choose, the best of them might be as simple as not saying a word.

Republished with gracious permission from The Catholic Servant.

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