97. Fourth Saturday of Lent

Meditations no. 143 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

Our Lenten penance us is not a negative task.

Every day we ask the Lord to grant us spatium verae poenitentiae, a time for true penance. One especially appropriate time for this is Lent, with its urgent call for purification, atonement, and reparation. St Leo the Great comments that although there is no season that is not rich in heavenly gifts, and although by the grace of God we always find the doors of divine mercy open, it is nevertheless good for the souls of all Christians to redouble their zeal during this particular season and to increase their desire to advance in the spiritual life and to be filled with confidence.

We need to be purified from the remains of past and present faults, and this we do by means of penance and mortification. These make us freer from attachment to sin, cleaner in God’s eyes, and less burdened for our journey along the road to holiness.

In Lent, the liturgy recalls the effect of Adam’s sin in the life of man. Adam did not want to be a good son of God; he rebelled. But we also hear the echoing chant of that felix culpa, “O happy fault!” which the whole Church will joyfully intone at the Easter Vigil.

God the Father, in the fullness of time, sent to the world his only-begotten Son, to re-establish peace; so that by his redeeming men from sin, adoptionem filiorum reciperemus, we might become sons of God, freed from the yoke of sin, capable of sharing in the divine intimacy of the Trinity. And so it has become possible for this new man, this new grafting of the children of God, to free all creation from disorder, restoring all things in Christ, who has reconciled them to God.

It is, then, a time of penance, but, as we have seen, this is not something negative. Lent should be lived in the spirit of filiation, which Christ has communicated to us and which is alive in our soul. Our Lord calls us to come nearer to him, to be like him: Be imitators of God as his dearly beloved children, cooperating humbly but fervently in the divine purpose of mending what is broken, of saving what is lost, of bringing back order to what sinful man has put out of order, of leading to its goal what has gone astray, of re-establishing the divine balance of all creation.

Mortification helps prayer and interior life.

Through penance we atone to the Lord for our guilt, and through mortification we get rid of obstacles to our inner growth. The patience of the spirit extinguishes the flesh’s impatience; goodness destroys malice; meekness overcomes anger; continence defeats intemperance. Chastity kills impurity. Thus the one who, by the spirit, mortifies the works of the flesh, will live.

The more we purify ourselves, the more our interior life will progress, because mortification has the great advantage of making it easier for us to be friends with God. If we wish our prayers to penetrate the heavens, let us take care to purify our mind of all vices or over-human thoughts. Mortification purifies the eyes and ears of the soul. As a result we are able to see the Lord more easily and be attentive to his words, in an ongoing conversation that characterizes our lives as contemplative souls.

Just think about the wonder of God’s love. Our Lord comes out to meet us, he waits for us, he’s by the roadside where we cannot fail to see him, and he calls each of us personally, speaking to us about our own things - which are also his. He stirs us to sorrow, opens our conscience to be generous; he encourages us to want to be faithful, so that we can be called his disciples. When we hear these intimate words of grace, which are by way of an affectionate reproach, we realize at once that our Lord has not forgotten us during all the time in which, through our fault, we did not see him. Christ loves us with all the inexhaustible charity of God’s own heart.

If we did not practise mortification, which is the prayer of the senses, and if we failed to subject our body and its inclinations to voluntary servitude, how difficult it would be for us to hear God speaking to us! We must fight against our wretchedness in order to rise up towards God and to hear and understand his words. Look: our Lord is anxious to guide us at a marvellous pace, both human and divine, which leads to joyful abandonment, happiness in suffering and self-forgetfulness. If any man has a mind to come my way, let him renounce self. This is a counsel we have all heard. Now we have to make a firm decision to put it into practice. May our Lord be able to use us so that, placed as we are at all the crossroads of the world - and at the same time placed in God - we become salt, leaven and light. Yes, you are to be in God, to enlighten, to give flavour, to produce growth and new life.

Generous small mortifications help our inner recollection, enabling us to pray at all times.

Without interior silence, a habitual disposition of inner recollection, it is very difficult, or almost impossible, to be contemplative. Only through constant interior mortification can we acquire the spirit of recollection which will enable us to be on terms of close friendship with our Lord. That is why, if conversation in our prayer is poor, and flows only with difficulty, it may be because our spirit of sacrifice is weak. We need to be more demanding on ourselves. For, like our conversation with our Lord, mortification has to be continual, like our heartbeat.

We are always temples of God. We must seek him at all times, especially during our prayer, at the centre of our soul in grace. In order to attain the inner silence we need, we have to mortify our external senses, and also our imagination and memory. We have to be particularly generous in small mortifications during the periods of interior silence which are a Custom in our plan of life. They are moments during which we try to practise more intensely what our Father asks us to do throughout the day. You should dedicate all your efforts, night and day, to uniting your soul and spirit to our Father God through prayer, through ceaseless loving contemplation. When your senses, your imagination, all the faculties of your soul, are immersed in God, then you won’t have any personal problems, and, being “divinized”, you will be able to say: vivo autem iam non ego, vivit vero in me Christus, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

This effort should be especially noticeable in our professional work, which takes up the greater part of our day. Rest assured that it is not difficult to convert work into a prayerful dialogue. As soon as you offer it up and then set to work, God is already listening and giving encouragement. We acquire the style of contemplative souls, in the midst of our daily work! Because we become certain that he is watching us, while he asks us to conquer ourselves anew: a little sacrifice here, a smile there for someone who bothers us, beginning the least pleasant but most urgent job first, carefulness in little details of order, perseverance in the fulfilment of our duty when it would be so easy to abandon it, not leaving for tomorrow what should be finished today: and all this to please him, our Father God! On your desk or in some inconspicuous place that nobody notices, you perhaps place your crucifix to awaken in you a contemplative spirit and to act as a textbook for your mind and soul where you learn the lessons of service.

If you make up your mind to follow these ways of contemplation, in the midst of your ordinary work, without doing anything odd or withdrawing from the world, you will immediately feel that you are a friend of the Master, with the God-given task of opening up the divine ways of the earth to the whole of mankind.

Let us ask our Blessed Lady, teacher of prayer, to help us attain, by mortification, the sensitivity we need to hear God’s voice in our soul, and so be able to turn all the moments of our day into a loving conversation with her Son, Jesus Christ.