St. Teresa – Prayer and reflection on mortification

“Why O Lord, should I be preoccupied with my fears and lose courage in the face of my weakness? You give me to understand that I must fortify myself in humility, and convince myself that I can do very little alone, and that without your help I am nothing. I shall put all my confidence in your mercy, and shall distrust my own strength, convinced that my weakness is caused by my self-reliance. You teach me not to be astonished at my struggle, for when a soul wishes to give itself over to mortification, it encounters difficulties on all sides. Does it wish to give up its ease? What a hardship! To scorn a point of honor? What a torture! To endure harsh words? Intolerable suffering! In short, it becomes filled with extreme sadness, but as soon as it resolved to die to the world, every anguish is at an end.”

Saint Teresa of Jesus

Penance and Mortification – What is the difference?

Q: OK, now I have a better grasp of what we mean by “mortification,” but that has raised another question. Is there difference between mortification and penance or penitence.

A: This is a very interesting question. The distinction between mortification (synonymous in most spiritual writers with self-denial, abnegation, self-renunciation, dying to self) and penance (synonymous with penitence, sacrifice or self-sacrifice, and “reparation”) has to do with the interior motive behind the action. In other words, the exterior action (fasting, for example, or taking a cold shower on a cold morning) can be exactly the same, but depending on the reason why I am doing the action (my intention), the spiritual nature of the act can be either mortification or penance.

The intentionality of an act of mortification is to “punish [i.e., discipline] my body [i.e., self-seeking tendencies] and bring it under control, to avoid any risk that, having acted as herald for others, I myself may be disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:27). In other words, I freely deny the satisfaction of a normal and healthy desire in order to grow in my spiritual maturity, to learn to govern the self-seeking tendencies built into my fallen nature. For example, I purposefully mortify my perfectly legitimate desire for dessert on Wednesdays and Fridays during Lent, so that I am better able to control an illegitimate desire to get drunk whenever that desire happens to surface. Mortification is spiritual training, tempering of the willpower in order to be able to better govern our passions and instincts, starving the bad plants in the garden (vices and selfish tendencies) so the good plants (virtues) can flourish.

The intentionality of an act of penance is to “make up in my own body what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ” (Colossians 1:24). I am doing penance for sin, making up for an evil, destructive deed, just as Christ did by dying on the cross. He offered his obedience as “payment” (or atonement) for our disobedience. This is how he repaired (made “reparation” for) the breach between God and man created by original sin. He sacrificed himself (made himself into an offering to God) on our behalf. Penance, therefore, is done as a way to tell God we are sorry for our sins, or for the sins of others, and to make up for them. Thus, my teenage son refused to go to Mass on Sunday, and so, to make up for this ungrateful offense against the majesty and goodness of God, I do penance on his behalf – perhaps making a Holy Hour on Monday evening instead of watching a favorite television show, or not listening to music during my morning commute this week, just to show God that someone (I) does indeed love the Giver more than the gifts. A good dad would do something similar if his son broke a neighbor’s window by throwing a rock; he would make up for it himself, if his son refused to do so. When we do penance, we are repairing for sin, reversing the self-indulgent act of sin by replacing it with a self-giving act of mortification.

Two other points remain on this issue. First, the only way that mortification and penance really help advance Christ’s Kingdom is if we are united to Christ. We must be living the life of grace – Christ must be alive in us – in order for us to unite our actions to his, so that they share in his merits. It’s like having a bank account with co-signers. The check only draws from the vault of merit if it is signed both by me (junior partner) and by Christ (senior partner). We cannot save ourselves by ourselves; we cannot grow in holiness apart from the source of holiness: “for cut off from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

Second, the concept of sacrifice also includes an element of intercession and petition. Offering God a sacrifice can be a way of intensifying a prayer of intercession. Thus, when St. Therese of the Child Jesus was interceding for the conversion of a criminal condemned to death, she and her sisters joined sacrifices (acts of self-denial) to their prayers. In the same way, we can offer sacrifices (acts of self-denial, obedience, patience…) to God in order to benefit other members of the Body of Christ who may be in need – those in temptation or sorrow, those in prison or suffering persecution. We are connected to them through our membership in Christ. It’s like a tug of war. We are all on the same team, pulling in the same direction. But sometimes someone on our team stumbles, loses their balance, or stops pulling as hard as they can. In those moments, we can pull harder, making up for their momentary lack, picking up the slack, so that they can have a quick breather and then get back into action.

We can draw a whole host of conclusions from these observations, but I will finish by pointing out just one. Since the distinction between mortification and penance is in the spiritual intention, not the physical action, the same physical action can serve simultaneously as both an act of mortification and of penance. We can do one action with multiple intentions. So don’t worry too much about whether your Lenten sacrifice is for mortification or for penance – make it for both!

Yours in Christ, Fr John Bartunek, LC

Fr. Barron comments on Pope John Paul II and Self-Mortification

The Lenten War on Self – Are You Prepared for Battle?

Saint Paul would not likely find many friends in some corners of the Church today – nor would Jesus for that matter. Primarily because they use what our culture would consider harsh language when dealing with sin in the Christian life. Paul uses the language of an elite athelete, the language of self-discipline and severe mortification. Jesus uses very graphic and violent imagery when emphasizing the seriousness of sin and those who excuse it or who would deal with it in a passive manner. As we enter into Lent, it might be a healthy cultural detox for us to meditate on these difficult things and to better understand the mind of God on how we are to wage war against our sin…

Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Well, I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air; but I pummel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.

St. Paul – 1 Corinthians Chapter 9

If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.

Jesus – St. Matthew Chapter 5

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

St. Paul – Hebrews Chapter 12

Since nature opposes what is good, I promise to declare a merciless war against myself. My weapons for the battle will be prayer, the practice of the presence of God, and silence. But, O my Life, You know that I am not skilled in handling these arms. Nevertheless, I will arm myself with sovereign confidence in You, with patience, humility, conformity to Your divine will, and supreme diligence. But where shall I find the aid I need to fight against so many enemies in such a continual battle? Ah! I know! You, my God, proclaim Yourself my Captain, and raising the standard of Your Cross, You lovingly say, ‘Come, follow Me; do not fear’

St Teresa Margaret of the Heart of Jesus

Seek Him – Find Him – Follow Him

Dan

Lent and mortification – what is mortification anyway?

Q: Dear Father John, what is “mortification” and how does it relate to Lent? What does Saint Paul mean in 1 Corinthians 9 where he says, “I pummel my body and subdue it…” Is he talking about “mortification”?

A: The root word for “mortification” comes from the Latin, mors and mortis, and it translates as “death.” In the spiritual life, therefore, mortification refers to voluntary actions by which we gradually “put to death” all of our vices, sinful habits, and the self-centered tendencies that lurk beneath them. Spiritual writers use terms like abnegation, sacrifice, self-sacrifice, and self-denial to refer to the same thing.

Jesus spoke about mortification as an absolute necessity for growth into Christian maturity. Here are some of the better known passages:

If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me (Luke 9:23)

In all truth I tell you, unless a wheat grain falls into the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies it yields a rich harvest (John 12:24).

Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it (Mark 8:35).

St Paul regularly emphasized this “best practice” of the spiritual life. Besides the passage you mention in your question, here are some other favorites:

…[Y]ou must see yourselves as being dead to sin but alive for God in Christ Jesus (Romans 6:11).

You were to put aside [we could say “put to death] your old self, which belongs to your old way of life and is corrupted by following illusory desires. Your mind was to be renewed in spirit so that you could put on the New Man that has been created on God’s principles, in the uprightness and holiness of the truth (Ephesians 4:22-24).

…[W]e too, then, should throw off everything that weighs us down and the sin that clings so closely, and with perseverance keep running in the race which lies ahead of us (Hebrews 12:1).

It may seem like overkill to list so many quotations (and there are a lot more), but I do so because this is a hard concept for us to accept. A secular culture by definition seeks heaven on earth. According to that mindset, suffering of any kind is valueless and to be avoided – a far cry from the Christian pattern of death to sin (through voluntary self-denial) as a path to true life.

In Pope Benedict’s recent message for Lent, he explains the reason behind this pillar of Christian spirituality: “Freely chosen detachment from the pleasure of food and other material goods helps the disciple of Christ to control the appetites of nature, weakened by original sin, whose negative effects impact the entire human person.”

In other words, because God has chosen to redeem our fallen human nature, and not just replace it, his grace enters into our wounded, self-centered, sin-tending souls, and gradually transforms them (think of Jesus’ parable of the leaven in the dough). But since we are free, spiritual creatures (not just instinct-driven squirrels), we have to freely cooperate with his grace in order for this process to fully develop. One of the ways we do this is through freely denying ourselves certain pleasures that are not in themselves sinful, e.g. not listening to the radio for the first three minutes of a half-hour commute, offering the silence as an act of mortification, and maybe using it to pray. When we do that, we learn to govern our tendencies to pleasure and self-seeking (which are always waiting for opportunities to run wild); we tame them so that they are fruitful and not destructive, like a tamed stallion as opposed to a wild stallion. This self-governance helps creates interior order and peace, so that we can better hear and respond to God’s action in our lives. The mortification is never an end in itself, but a means by which we become better followers of Christ.

Spiritual writers have used many images to explain the value of mortification. Picture a jar full of very sour vinegar. You want to fill it up with sweet honey. First you have to empty out the vinegar, and then scrub the inside of the jar, and only then can you put in the honey. Just so, to receive the many gifts of grace God wants to give us, we have to empty out and scrub clean every corner of our heart and mind, otherwise the grace can’t get in. Think of a garden (as in Jesus’ parable of the sower). The soil is our fallen human nature, riddled and overgrown with poisonous weeds (vices, selfish tendencies, psychological and emotional wounds…). God comes and plants the seed of grace, the seeds of all the Christian virtues. We water those seeds through prayer and the sacraments. But we also need to pull up the weeds (and some of them have very deep roots), otherwise they will choke the growth of grace, and our virtues will end up looking like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree.

OK, now let’s get practical. What does this have to do with Lent? The Church is a wise mother. She knows that we like to feast more than we like to fast, which is perfectly normal. But she also knows that if we don’t fast (practice mortification), we will get spiritually out of shape pretty quickly. So she has built into the liturgical year certain seasons when we focus a little bit more than usual on this aspect of our spiritual life – penitential days and seasons, like Lent. So, fasting (some form of mortification, voluntary self-denial) is a normal part of every Catholic’s Lenten journey; it gets us in shape for the holiest days of the year – Holy Thursday through Easter Sunday.

Each of us should choose some form of mortification (something that we notice, but not something that distracts us or overburdens us – balance and realism are important for a healthy spiritual life). In this way, we can unite our increased spiritual efforts to those of our Catholic brothers and sisters throughout the world, making this season a real family affair. Together we go with Jesus into the desert, where he spent 40 days practicing mortification, as a preparation for his public mission.

In another post on this blog, we have made some suggestions about what you can “give up for Lent.” Hopefully this current entry has helped you understand more deeply the value of giving up something.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC