Penance and Self-Denial

Lent is a time when we are asked to share in a particular way in the Passion of our Lord – to share in it through penance, because penance, self-denial, is a way of training ourselves to choose love instead of selfishness. And behind all the particular forms of self-denial that we may choose for ourselves, behind and far deeper than these, there is precisely the self-denial of taking fully and wholeheartedly what the moment brings to us of vexation or labor – the people who put heavy demands on our patience, the work that is hard and unrewarding, the duty that has no appeal for us – of taking all these things as they come to us and accepting them fully and turning them fully into the acts of love which they ought to be.

There is one thing more. Where troubles and hardships are concerned we do well to think of our own as little as possible, and then only in comparison with his. We are very wrong if we despise small things because they are small; but at the same time we are very wrong if, when they are painful, we forget that they are small, a tiny drop that can be of value at all only when it is poured into the brimming cup of his Passion like the drop of water poured into the wine at Mass.

from The Pain of Christ and the Sorrow of God by Gerald Vann, O.P.

Dear Lord, thank you so much for the opportunities for penance and self-denial that You give me each day. Help me to make the most of them, to not waste a single one. May they truly be a sharing in Your Passion, transformed by Your love into a living sacrifice of praise. Amen.