Spiritual Growth at Work: Mortification, Part 2
Before we turn back to Father Edward Leen's teaching on mortification, let's take a broad look at how mortification can play a role in our work everyday.
If that project you're working on proves tougher than you anticipated, instead of giving in to frustration and impatience, perhaps making a nuisance of yourself to those around you, mortification helps you take a deep breath and learn to control those feelings and stick to your work instead of giving in to those feelings.
If the boss tends to be, well, bossy, even overbearing and obnoxious, mortification helps you to step back and not take things personally, maybe even try to understand that the boss probably has his own boss and his own set of pressures and frustrations.
If you've got co-workers who get on your nerves for all the various and sundry reasons that co-workers get on one's nerves, mortification helps you to ignore the words and behaviors that get under your skin and remember that these too are children of God and, besides, they're not paid to be your best buddy. You and they have a job to do.
So how does mortification - the practice of subduing our bodily desires - help us here? Father Leen describes the effects of mortification:
We turn back to Father Leen for a deeper explanation of mortification:
But it's not just because of our current state of affairs that we need to practice mortification. Holy Mother Church has always taught us that to mortify ourselves is to embrace the Cross, just as Our Lord specifically told us:
Next time, lest we think that mortification is somehow a strictly optional practice of our Holy Faith, we'll see how Father Leen sets the record straight about the central role of mortification in the life of a faithful Catholic.
If that project you're working on proves tougher than you anticipated, instead of giving in to frustration and impatience, perhaps making a nuisance of yourself to those around you, mortification helps you take a deep breath and learn to control those feelings and stick to your work instead of giving in to those feelings.
If the boss tends to be, well, bossy, even overbearing and obnoxious, mortification helps you to step back and not take things personally, maybe even try to understand that the boss probably has his own boss and his own set of pressures and frustrations.
If you've got co-workers who get on your nerves for all the various and sundry reasons that co-workers get on one's nerves, mortification helps you to ignore the words and behaviors that get under your skin and remember that these too are children of God and, besides, they're not paid to be your best buddy. You and they have a job to do.
So how does mortification - the practice of subduing our bodily desires - help us here? Father Leen describes the effects of mortification:
"The ultimate effect is to reduce our senses to the control of our reason, our imagination to our will, and our will to God. It may be defined then as a deliberate renouncement of the life of disorderly satisfaction of our concupiscences, and a curbing of every inordinate exercise of our external and internal faculties. "A word on "concupiscence": while it is frequently associated with lust, or sexual desire, it should be more broadly understood as the desire of the lower appetite contrary to reason. The object of the lower or sensuous appetite is gratification of the senses. The object of reason is the good of our entire human nature (as opposed to just our fallen nature). Our lower or sensuous appetite is unrestrained and leads to disorder when we pursue sensuous gratification without regard to our reason. The practice of mortification therefore helps us to subdue our sensuous desires and place them under the guidance of our reason, whose ultimate object is God, the Supreme Good of our human nature.
We turn back to Father Leen for a deeper explanation of mortification:
"According to the signification of the word, it means a process of destruction, a dealing of death to that activity in us which seeks pleasure for the sake of pleasure; its purpose is that this activity being deadened, the life received in baptism may have free scope for its development. It aims at death in order to secure life. If we are to realize our vocation as Christians this voluntary death is imposed on us; it is the condition of our sanctification. ‘Know ye not that all we who are baptized in Christ Jesus, are baptized in His death, for we are buried together with Him by Baptism unto death: that as Christ is risen from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life.’ Even as Christ ‘for the joy that was set before Him, endured the Cross,’ so we, by His Grace, endure the cross of mortification for the joy that gleams beyond the pathway of death, for the light towards which we stretch in the darkness, for the fullness of life in God towards which we are called and towards which by His Grace, we press forward."As with all Father Leen's writing, please read his words slowly and carefully. This isn't like pop music; it's more like Beethoven. We need to savor his words. Isn't this a wonderful image, especially as we look around us at our world and where it's heading? Can we afford to just hang on for the ride in this world of ours? Can you see how mortification serves to lift us up and turn us toward God in the midst of a society and culture in decline?
But it's not just because of our current state of affairs that we need to practice mortification. Holy Mother Church has always taught us that to mortify ourselves is to embrace the Cross, just as Our Lord specifically told us:
If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.
(Mark 8: 34-35)
Next time, lest we think that mortification is somehow a strictly optional practice of our Holy Faith, we'll see how Father Leen sets the record straight about the central role of mortification in the life of a faithful Catholic.
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