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Fifteenth Wednesday after Pentecost
- caelidomum
- Sep 23
- 4 min read
Fifteenth Wednesday after Pentecost. The Spirit of Penitence.
Summary of the Morrow’s Meditation.
We will meditate to-morrow upon the spirit of penance, and we shall see that it consists: 1st, in the sighs of a heart repenting its past sins and its present wretchedness; 2d, in the firm determination to reform our life. We will then make the resolution: 1st, to give ourselves up with all our heart to the spirit of penance, bitterly regretting our sad past life, and humbly sighing over our sins and present wretchedness; 2d, to make some special acts of penance. Our spiritual nosegay shall be the words of the Psalmist: “My sin is always before me” (Ps. l. 5).
Meditation for the Morning.
Let us adore Our Lord Jesus Christ, the most perfect of penitents, who is willing to take upon Himself our sins, to weep over them with tears of blood in the Garden of Olives, and to offer reparation for them to His Father, prostrate on His knees and with His face to the earth. What homage ought we not to render to Him for such great goodness !
The Sighs of our Heart over our Past Faults and our Present Wretchedness.
One of our greatest evils is to hide from our selves what sinners and miserable creatures we are; it is to have a high opinion of ourselves, whereas we ought to be covered with such shame and confusion at the remembrance of our offences that we ought to blush to appear before God and to live amongst the holy children of the Church, that we ought to look upon the most desert soli tudes as the places to which we deserve to be relegated forever ( Ps. lix. 8); and, lastly, we ought constantly to bear this shame in ourselves and keep it constantly before our eyes (Ps. xliii. 16). The true penitent never ceases to lose sight of his sins and to sigh over them (Ps. xxxvii. 18); he con siders himself as a criminal guilty of high treason towards the Divine Majesty, and feels it to be only just that he should be despised and treated with seventy, that all creatures should rise against him, that God Himself should exercise him by means of internal trials, disgust, aridities, abandonments; and he looks upon it as a great favor not to be abandoned by God throughout eternity. Fearing, in spite of all this, not yet to have a sufficient spirit of penitence, he does not cease to ask it of Heaven: “O Lord, my God,” he says with St. Anselm, “give to my heart a sincere penitence, to my soul a true contrition, to my eyes a fountain of tears” (Or. x.), or with St. Augustine: Woe to me, for I have sinned; my faults make me tremble, and I blush for them in Thy presence (Conf., ii. x.); and full of the desire to expiate his sins, he cheerfully accepts all the penances he may meet with, above all those which are not of his choice, which are contrary to his inclinations, still more those which are attached to his position, lastly, death itself, as the just punishment of his sins. Alas ! how many Christians, very different from these true penitents, never enter into themselves, are contented with their state, and never humble and confound themselves either before God or before men, or in the bottom of their conscience ! Unhappy those who blind themselves, who neglect penance, and always lead the same kind of life, without ever reproaching themselves. Are we not of that number ?
Resolution to Correct Ourselves.
If the first element of penitence is to weep over our sins, the second is to be strongly determined not to fall again into them. The one is inseparable from the other, since a frank detestation of sin necessarily involves the resolve not to commit it anymore. There is therefore no kind of penance which is real and acceptable to the divine justice, except that wherein there exists a firm and resolute determination never again to offend God, whatever it may cost us, according to what Tertullian says. In vain shall we make acts of contrition and sacramental confessions, all will be of no use to us, unless at the same time we renounce all self-indulgence in our con duct and the indolence of a purely natural life; if we are not resolved, from the bottom of our hearts, to live in a better manner; to substitute for our avarice charity towards the poor, for our pride the humility which despises self and suffers contempt patiently,' for our sensual pleasures the spirit of mortification, the acceptance of sickness or other sufferings, and the austerities inspired by the spirit of penance; lastly, for our whole life of caprice and fancies a life perfectly regulated and usefully employed. Are these our dispositions ? In what illusions may we not have indulged on this head!
Resolutions and spiritual nosegay as above.
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