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On the spirit of penance
we should have
when receiving the ashes, and in which
we should live all during Lent
16.1
First Point
The purpose of the
Church in putting ashes on your head today is to make you realize that today
you should be filled with the true spirit of penance. This sacred ceremony
is a remnant of the Church's ancient discipline which obliged public
penitents at the start of their penance to receive ashes on their heads at
the hands of the ministers of the holy altars in full view of the faithful.
You should
resolve to unite yourself with this institution of the Church, to
participate in it, and begin on this holy day to prepare yourself by a
suitable disposition of heart for this holy practice, the soul of which is
sincere compunction. This is how we should begin and end this holy season of
forty days.
16.2 Second Point
In receiving the ashes
ask God that this spirit of penance may inspire you, accompany your fasting,
and sanctify it. External fasting is of little value; it must also humble
your spirit while mortifying your flesh.
The effect
that the reception of the ashes should produce in you is to make penance a
part of all your behavior, to make you fast with your eyes, your tongue, and
your heart: your eyes, by great recollection and a turning aside from
whatever might distract you; your tongue, by an exact silence which will cut
you off from creatures, in order to attach yourself only to God during
this holy season; your heart, by renouncing entirely all thoughts
which might distract you, draw you away, and interrupt your communing with
God.
The result
of Christian fasting is mortification of the senses and selfish
inclinations, and a detachment from creatures.
16.3 Third Point
To encourage us to the
spirit of fasting while depriving ourselves of sense pleasures and detaching
us from all the satisfactions we might find in the use of creatures, the
Church by the voice of the priest who imposes the ashes on us tells us to
remember that, being human, we are only ashes and will return to ashes.[i]
Nothing more
strongly incites us to detachment from created things and to sincere penance
than the thought of death. This is why the Church wants us to think about
this truth during all the time we spend in the penitential exercises of
Lent. She hopes that through this holy thought we may be encouraged to
practice penance with more affection and fervor.
We will die
and we will die only once. We will die well and with God only insofar as we
have lived in the practice of penance and have deprived ourselves of the
pleasures that the sensual seek in the use of creatures. Do we wish to die a
holy death? Let us live as true penitents.
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