John Zmirak offers some thoughts on penance and self-denial. To quote:
And this is what Chesterton teaches about penance and suffering: That the only man whose life was an answer to death was the self-proclaimed Son of Man who marched on the Cross like a city whose walls he meant to scale, whose gates he would compass with his arms, whose deepest treasuries he would break into and ransack. To a modern weakling like me, who endures a few hours without his Nicorette as an afternoon spent in Hell, this isn’t puzzling. Puzzles have solutions. It’s not a surprise, since no one could have expected it. The figure of the risen Christ doesn’t leap out at us from behind a door: It falls on us like a blazing tower, then creeps back up with a terrible smile like a tiny yellow flower. Its echoes ring through the truncated lives of millions—remembered in this City’s Colosseum, or nameless in the ash heaps of Dachau and Siberia. How strange, how fitting, and yet how hideous that we still call our children after torture victims like Lawrence, Agnes, Lucy, Agatha, and Ignatius. How odd that once we stopped handing on such names, and ceased to teach our children the age-inappropriate story of the baby born to be crucified, we soon stop bothering to bear them. Could it be that once we no longer believe we are procreating souls born to eternity, the whole business hardly seems worth the trouble?Share
