Prayer is a Penance

Prayer is a penance, and it must be so. It is difficult to cast out distractions. Sometimes we have to fight the whole period through to remove thoughts that should not be there. At other times we are tired, or we don't feel like praying. Let me remind you that penance adds a great value to our prayer. When the three Kings came before Our Divine Lord, they did not bring only frankincense, which signified prayer. They also brought gold, which signifies charity, and myrrh, symbolic of sacrifice. A life of interior prayer is a life of sacrifice. One of the prayers we used to pray in honor of the Holy Kings begged that we might never appear before God empty-handed when we came to pray, but that we would always have some type of sacrifice to bring with us. ~Fr. Casimir Puskorius, CMRI

I came across the above in my reading the other day, and it was just what I needed to hear as I was feeling too weary to pray. Of course, that was no reason not to pray, and I knew that very well, but I greatly appreciated this reminder of the sacrificial nature of prayer. After all, it's not about me. Prayer is all about God, and I could not even begin to pray but for the many graces He so lavishly gives me in His goodness and mercy. That alone is enough for me to fall on my knees before Him in praise and adoration.

Fr. Puskorius mentions the Three Kings, bearing gifts as they traversed afar in search of the Holy Child of Bethlehem -- gold to crown Him, frankincense to to worship Him, and myrrh to anoint Him. "Myrrh is mine: its bitter perfume / Breathes a life of gathering gloom. / Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding dying, / Sealed in the stone-cold tomb." Sometimes I spend days, weeks even, in a stone-cold tomb. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as it's not the tomb of self-pity and slothfulness. The tomb of Christ is the womb of eternal life. If I die with Him, I shall also live with Him (2 Tim 2:11). The everlasting light shines into all our tombs, shattering every darkness. He is the living one; He died and behold, He is alive for evermore (Rev 1:18). Myrrh is mine, but life is His. He Himself is life! I live now, not I, but Christ in me (Gal 1:20). Thanks be to God! Alleluia!

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.