LENT begins early this year, on February 18th. At its best, this season is a great adventure of self-denial and inner participation in the mystical events of the Incarnation. Think about Lent ahead of time. Thomas Droleskey writes:

The penances we are asked to undertake need not be anything extraordinary. That is, a voluntary self-denial of some sort of food that we really like is an act of penance. God knows how much we become attached to sensible pleasures and delights. Our voluntarily acts of penance, which must be kept to ourselves and not announced to others, detach us from self and self-pleasure, inclining us to pray all the more for truly great crosses to bear for the sake of souls and for the sake of the restoration of  the Church herself in all of her glory as she exercises the Social Reign of Christ the King in the lives of men and their nations. Getting up when we don’t want to get up, doing our chores when we would prefer doing something else, indeed, just going about our daily duties in a spirit of love for the Cross can help us to grow in a love of Heaven and a detestation of anything that impedes our growth in sanctity to the highest degree possible below that of the Blessed Mother herself.

The ordinary penances of daily living are so obvious that it is difficult to see them.

Refraining from saying a cross word when provoked by another.

Accepting insults and slights with grace, understanding that the intentions of all hearts will be made manifest on the Last Day at the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead and that the insults and slights that we endure from others pale into insignificance when we consider how our sins helped to crown Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ with thorns and to cover His Holy Face with spittle.

Forgiving others without any hint of bitterness or resentment, understanding that nothing anyone does to us is comparable to what our sins did to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who forgives us in the Sacrament of Penance. Who are we to refuse to forgive others when we are forgiven so freely? We are required to forgive. Actually doing so, though, may take an act of humble self-denial.

In brief, therefore, we must accept every little thing that happens in the course of a day as having been foreseen by God for all eternity as being precisely the particular cross at that moment in our lives that He knew was best for us and which we can make redemptive if we cooperative with all of the sufficient grace provided for us at that very moment. In short, we are given moments of relatively small penances all throughout the course of each day of our lives.

True, there will be times of the more difficult crosses. Painful, debilitating long-term illnesses. An accident that wipes away in a second a person’s ability to think or to speak or to walk or to see or to hear. The loss of a loved one. The uncertainty and material instability caused by the lack of an income sufficient to provide for one’s own needs despite hard work and sacrifice. The real human pain of having to live in a time when ravenous wolves are dressed in the clothing of shepherds and seek to confuse the faithful by denying almost every article contained in the Deposit of Faith, acting as though the Church began in 1962 and that nothing before then matters at all (and that is indeed a schismatic act to even mention anything before 1962). Oh, yes, there are the difficult crosses that come our way.

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