“I don’t believe that penance and mortification afford any pleasure to God,” declared Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the great Protestant polemicist. On the contrary,
I think he would be more likely to say, “Poor silly creatures; when I make gnats, I teach them to dance in the summer sunshine; when I make the fish of the sea, they leap up from the waves with intense delight; and when I make birds, I show them how to sing.” God hath no delight in the miseries of his creatures, and the flagellations that fools give to themselves they deserve for their folly, but they certainly bring no pleasure to the heart of God.
That’s an odd way for a Catholic to begin a pre-Lenten reflection. Hopefully it goes without saying, but I don’t agree with Spurgeon! Still, reading passage of his, I can’t help but ask myself, Why not? What exactly does Spurgeon get wrong? Can I muster a single good argument for penance, one that Zacchaeus or Mary Magdalene would be proud of? Can you?
Well, I’d like to give it a whack. Because I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I haven’t had a really good Lent in… well, ever. And I think that’s partly because I just don’t see the point. I’m not clear on what penance is for. Maybe some of you are in the same boat. And who knows? Maybe if we chew it over a little, we can put these forty days to good use.
So, let’s get cracking.
First of all, Spurgeon is right about one thing: God doesn’t want us to suffer. Or, rather, suffering is never an end-in-itself. Protestants (like C.H.S.) might quote the Westminster Catechism: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.” But Catholics would agree wholeheartedly. As the old Baltimore Catechism puts it, “God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven.” It’s the same answer—practically the same language!
So, why does the Church devote a whole season to making ourselves miserable? Because, as C. S. Lewis argues, “God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”
We Christians might read this and think to ourselves, “That’s why modern man is so miserable. They don’t have God. Unlike me, the good church boy!” Yet, over time, we realize that merely professing Christianity doesn’t mean we “have God.” There are still so many obstacles that stand between us and Him.
Of course, the most serious obstacles are our sins. But once we rid ourselves of our attachment to sin, we still have a long ways to go. Why? Because too much of our attention is still going to things other than God.
If we’re going to go deeper into this matter, though, I need a little help from an old friend.
John Henry Newman is one of the greatest theologians who ever lived, which is why he’ll be a Doctor of the Church someday. Great theologians seldom make great preachers—if anything, the reverse is true—but he’s a glaring exception to that rule.
Do you have a volume of his sermons? If not, go buy one right now. I recommend the big, beautiful hardcover put out by Ignatius Press. It’s a little dear, but you’ll want something that will hold up after many readings. After the Bible, it’s probably the book I revisit the most.
Anyway, my favorite of Newman’s homilies is called “Love, The One Thing Needful.” (It’s also available online.) He begins by reflecting on the first verses of 1 Corinthians 13, where St. Paul lists all thing that are worthless if we lack love. It doesn’t matter (he says) if I speak with the tongues of men or angels, or have the gift of prophecy, or understand all mysteries, or have all faith, or bestow all my goods to feed the poor, or give my body to be burned… If I lack charity, I have nothing.
But then Newman asks a question goes a little further. How do we grow in love? What practical steps can we take to become more loving? The answer is penance. The Cardinal warns that,
Till we, in a certain sense, detach ourselves from our bodies, our minds will not be in a state to receive divine impressions, and to exert heavenly aspirations. A smooth and easy life, an uninterrupted enjoyment of the goods of Providence, full meals, soft raiment, well-furnished homes, the pleasures of sense, the feeling of security, the consciousness of wealth,—these, and the like, if we are not careful, choke up all the avenues of the soul, through which the light and breath of heaven might come to us.
A hard life is, alas! no certain method of becoming spiritually minded, but it is one out of the means by which Almighty God makes us so. We must, at least at seasons, defraud ourselves of nature, if we would not be defrauded of grace.
If we attempt to force our minds into a loving and devotional temper, without this preparation, it is too plain what will follow,—the grossness and coarseness, the affectation, the effeminacy, the unreality, the presumption, the hollowness, (suffer me, my brethren, while I say plainly, but seriously, what I mean,) in a word, what Scripture calls the Hypocrisy, which we see around us; that state of mind in which the reason, seeing what we should be, and the conscience enjoining it, and the heart being unequal to it, some or other pretense is set up, by way of compromise, that men may say, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace.”
This great saint goes on to assures that, “after enjoining this habitual preparation of heart, let me bid you cherish, what otherwise it were shocking to attempt, a constant sense of the love of your Lord and Saviour in dying on the cross for you.”
In penance, we stop enjoying worldly things so we can become more fully immersed in the love of God. And as the psalmist cries to God, “thy loving kindness is better than life.” That sounds to me like a pretty good trade.
So far, we’ve argued that penance is good because it deepens our love for God. But why, then, is it so unpleasant?
This has to do with theosis, or divinization: the belief that God, “in a plan of sheer goodness, freely created man to make him share in His own blessed life.” (That’s from the new Catechism of the Catholic Church.) The idea of theosis comes from Jesus’s prayer in John 14, that “all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us.”
That means we have to destroy everything that stands between us and total unity with God. And that doesn’t just mean sin. Because we are fallen, it means our inordinate attachment for things that are good-in-themselves. Gluttony is the obvious example: our (perfectly legitimate!) love of food becomes sinful when it becomes inordinate.
Yet there are more fundamental parts of our selves that we also must purge. For example, a general desire for our own comfort or self-preservation will always be a major obstacle to union with God. That’s why the saints fast, not only from food, but also from water and sleep. It’s why they wear hairshirts or whip themselves. It’s why St. Philip Neri shaved half of his head—including his beard.
We spend most of our day preoccupied with these things that are not-God. Penance helps us to keep our minds and bodies from dwelling on lesser things—including lesser goods—so they in order to enjoy our one supreme Good. This is what it means to die to ourselves. It’s what St. Paul meant when he said, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”
Needless to say, this self-discipline is unpleasant. It’s why we associate penance with suffering. But the suffering isn’t the point. We may as well say the point of quitting smoking is to get headaches and mood swings. No: the point is to get healthy. Headaches and mood swings are a symptom of addiction, not good health.
Whenever you break an addiction—whether it’s to cigarettes, or sin, or your own potty Self—you’re going to experience withdrawal pains. The only way to perservere is by constantly reminding yourself that, once the withdrawals are over, you’ll not only be free of your vice: you’ll be free of your dependence, too. You’ll be happier and healthier; you’ll also be stronger, more determined. It will be easier to choose the Good in every other area of life. That’s a beautiful thing.
Not only are penitents holier than the rest of us: they’re also happier, too. That may seem absurd. And I don’t just mean in the next life—i.e., they breeze through Purgatory or go straight to Heaven). They do, that, too. But they’re also happier in this life.
As Mother Mary Francis (that great daughter of St. Clare) points out, Zacchaeus is the very archtype of a joyful penitent:
Up there in his tree, Zacchaeus fully saw what a rotter he had been. He had no taste at all for saying what other people were doing; but he saw what he did; he became this man of purpose, and he became so alert to opportunities for reparation that he said he was going to pay back fourfold. And he was obviously joyous. You can see him scrambling down out of that tree and going off to lunch with Christ, very penitent and very joyful.
So, of course, is the Poverello himself. As Mother notes,
Real penance is a driving force. We see this dramatically in our Father Saint Francis. He wept because “Love is not loved.” He just could not get over this, and he was so driven by this—that Love was not loved enough by him. He went on with such purpose that, in the sacred stigmata, love finally broke out all over him.
The one thing everyone knows about St. Francis is that he was joyful. It’s nearly a dogma of the Catholic Church that he was the happiest man who ever lived. What few today realize is that he was one of history’s most severe ascetics. One story from his life would suffice, I think, to make this point.
Once, after treating a fellow friar too harshly, Francis preached a sermon in front of a huge crowd totally in the nude. The friar forgave him, but the draft in the Church gave Francis a bad cold. His fellow friars cooked him a blackbird fried in olive oil, which he enjoyed so much that he began to lick his fingers.
He stopped before licking the eighth finger, however, and admonished himself: “You glutton! I am always preaching to people that they ought to live a life of penance and poverty. Meanwhile, I secretly eat delicious bird meat! You will pay for this dearly, Brother Ass!”
Francis made a haltar with a rope and put it around his neck. Then asked one of his brothers to lead him around town like a dog while crying, “Look, everybody! Here is the man who comes and tells you to fast and do penance, while in secret he eats delicate bird-meat! He is a glutton, a lover of good food—a hypocrite!”
This is who St. Francis is. You just don’t get the bird-preaching, the wolf-charming, or the songs about Brother Sun and Sister Moon without a constant, relentless devotion to penance.
Yet that was the secret to Francis’s joy. We might call it the Franciscan Paradox: no man ever inflicted such terrible suffering upon himself, and yet no man was ever so happy from one moment to the next. What’s more, millions who have followed in the Poverello’s footsteps. And as all of them will tell you, his methods work.
That, I think, is what Spurgeon didn’t quite understand. Yet it’s so easy for us to forget, too.f you have a Lenten routine that works for you, keep it up. But if you struggle (as I do) with the idea of penance, you migth want to keep that image of St. Francis in front of you. Empty yourself, as he did, to make room for the love of God.
Remember, the Church doesn’t have these seasons of penance because God wants us to suffer. She has seasons of penance because, like God, she wants us to be happy—not at Easter, or in ten years, or when you’re dead, but right now. That’s the whole point.
Yes, Lent is a season of sorrow. But if we do it right, it should be a time of great happiness and peace. That’s the paradox. But it’s quite true. Just ask St. Francis.
We’ll give him the last word:
To all those who love the Lord with their whole heart, with their whole soul and mind, with their whole strength and love their neighbors as themselves, and hate their bodies with their vices and sins, and receive the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and produce worthy fruits of penance:
Oh, how happy and blessed are these men and women when they do these things and persevere in doing them, since the Spirit of the Lord will rest upon them and He will make His home and dwelling among them. They are children of the heavenly Father, whose works they do, and they are spouses, brothers, and mothers of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Godspeed, my friends. A blessed Ash Wednesday to you all. And remember: “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I say, Rejoice!”
Friends, if you’re looking for worthy recipients of alms this Lent, please consider giving to the Marian Friars Minor, an order of traditonal Franciscans who are doing outstanding work.
One of their major apostolates is their Third Order. They emphasize strict adherence to the original Rule of the Third Order, which St. Francis founded to share his own charism—that of the joyful penitent—with the laity. In fact, St. Francis originally dubbed it the Order of Penance. It was the the O.G. “universal call to holiness.”
The MFMs are dedicated to reviving the Order of Penance, and I can’t think of a more worthy cause. So, please consider helping them out this Lent. If you’re Catholic, you may also consider discerning the Third Order with them. I’ll be right there with you.
Peace and the Good!