The Duty of Self-Denial

If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. ~Luke 9:23

He bids you take up your cross; therefore accept the daily opportunities which occur of yielding to others, when you need not yield, and of doing unpleasant services, which you might avoid. He bids those who would be highest, live as the lowest: therefore, turn from ambitious thoughts, and (as far as you religiously may) make resolves against taking on you authority and rule. He bids you sell and give alms; therefore, hate to spend money on yourself. Shut your ears to praise, when it grows loud: set your face like a flint, when the world ridicules, and smile at its threats. Learn to master your heart, when it would burst forth into vehemence, or prolong a barren sorrow, or dissolve into unseasonable tenderness. Curb your tongue, and turn away your eye, lest you fall into temptation. Avoid the dangerous air which relaxes you, and brace yourself upon the heights. Be up at prayer "a great while before day," and seek the true, your only Bridegroom, "by night on your bed." So shall self-denial become natural to you, and a change come over you, gently and imperceptibly; and, like Jacob, you will lie down in the waste, and will soon see Angels, and a way opened for you into heaven.

~Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman
Parochial and Plain Sermons: Sermon 7, The Duty of Self-Denial

Dearest Jesus, my true and only Bridegroom, strengthen me anew to take up my cross this day and to follow You into life everlasting. Let me learn from You the joy of emptying myself through self-denial as You emptied Yourself for the glory of the Father. Amen.

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.