Friday, 2/ 17/1
Jesus sad, “Whoever wishes
to come after me must deny himself.” That leaves us wondering in what ways we
must deny ourselves.
When I was a seventeen-year-old
novice the priest told us to practice all kinds of mortification. We were to
punish our boyish yearnings, putting them to death. We humorously referred to
it as “doing a little morto.”
In dust-mopping the
bedrooms I came on one boy’s “morto.” Dave would neatly line up his shoes under
his bed, then, he would put three pebbles in each shoe to keep him from loving
himself too much.
Does the Lord want us to
put pebbles in our shoes? Does he want us to put salt in our coffee? Are we
meant to devise little types of self- torture? Well, maybe for
seventeen-year-olds it was the right way of getting across the need for
“toughing it.”
The rest of us are only
bound to accept the troubles that come our way. In ages past the Church went
wrong in following the Greek philosophers who saw the body as the enemy of the
soul. That led to heavy penances that led to poor health. We have come around
to seeing that a healthy body is the ideal companion for a healthy soul.
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