Lent: Self-denial/self-discipline

[Trishie]

Self-denial​

Jesus, my life is not always centred on You. Wincingly, I drag across the broken glass of trial and duty, inspired by Your willingness to accept responsibilities, regardless of joy or calamity. For in the self-denial of serving others we are freed from selfishness and sin.

You died agonisingly for each person, obeying God’s will despite Your human vulnerability and dread. I stand humbly at the foot of Your salvation, its totality of giving shaming my reluctance to sacrifice self wholly to You. I offer my own will, constrained though it is by cowardice and compromise.

Jesus, how can I carry the cross that Your true followers must bear? How shall I emerge to embrace true commitment in ministry of others? You who are Son of God, sweated blood in contemplation of such abandonment of self. You asked the Father that you might forgo such a burden.

Were not Your divine origin, Your innocence, and Your sacred prayer, enough to save and sanctify us? Yet in anguished awareness deeper than mine or any other’s, You complied humbly with the Father’s will to sever our bonds of unlove, with the shattering of every fibre of Your humanity. In Your example, therefore, I place my trust and my cause for others’ and my salvation and blessing. I give myself to You, trying to bargain, raising reluctant, pleading eyes to Your thorn-encircled face: “Not this, Lord! I cannot face this loss, that difficulty…”

Dear Jesus, I appeal to You for grace to relinquish my fearful grip, releasing to You the full extent of my bondage. Will You lift this burden with its splinters of lack of charity and trust? I offer the grief of a soul betrayed by itself, in plea for Your forgiveness, healing and for my freedom to love You above all and others as myself, in harmony with Your will.

You know me in my human vulnerability and perfidy, my striving and hope—for You love each person with such depth that I flickeringly suspect its intensity and intimacy. If only I believed, understood and reciprocated! Please accept the teared jewel of this fragile communion of my desire with Yours. Please so draw me into Your love that it is revealed through me in glory and wonder!

You emptied Yourself to become subject to human limitation and suffering. You struggled against ignorance and selfishness, against dullness of spirit and mind in others, battling unto death the powers of evil for our sakes. Battle thus within me also, Jesus, defeating in each moment of my life the power of sin.

With Your flooding love, please drown my protests, pacify my fears and raise me from anxiety regarding pain, grief, disgrace, loss and abandonment. Live in me the cheerful, creative dedication owed to the duties of my vocation and relationships. As gift to the Trinity, allow me to share fully in the great love You consummate for us. Thank You for the privilege to follow Your path all my life, then to share in Your eternal life with all my family, and friends. 1981 (from ‘a handful of wildflowers’)

“He who rejects discipline despises his own self; he who listens to correction wins discernment.” [Proverbs 15:33]

 

[vivnes]

O my God, relying on Thy promises, I hope that, through the infinite merits of Jesus Christ, Thou wilt grant me pardon of my sins, and the graces necessary to serve Thee in this life and to obtain eternal happiness in the next. Amen

We are called to love God with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength. Any more, impossible; any less, dangerous. “For to those who love the Lord all things issue in good.” (cf. St. Augustine, Morals of the Catholic Church; 8, 13; 11, 18) In order to do this we cannot presume on our own powers. We are commanded to beg the Lord and his saints with supplications of hope.

“When God reveals Himself and calls him, man cannot fully respond to the divine love by his own powers. He must hope that God will give him the capacity to love Him in return and to act in conformity with the commandments of charity.” (CCC 2090)

“Man is a beggar before God.” (CCC 2559)

“St. Thomas More, shortly before his martyrdom, consoled his daughter: ‘Nothing can come but that that God wills. And I make me very sure that whatsoever that be, seem it never so bad in sight, it shall indeed be the best’.” (CCC 313)