Are You Scrupulous When Lenten Sacrifice Gets "Easier" and You Look To Do More?

Are you being scrupulous if you want to intensify your Lenten sacrifices because they seem to be getting easier? "Scrupulous" means you worry about doing wrong. It's one of the perils of trying to live a holy life. If you slip into scrupulosity, you can drive yourself crazy. It's not good for your soul. I've been subject to scrupulosity from time to time; and I've known some people who really suffered from this. Here's a simple example of how someone might get caught up in scrupulosity during Lent.

Let's say you've kept your Lenten discipline of fasting and abstinence. Maybe you challenged yourself a bit and now that we're in the "home stretch" whatever you've "given up" doesn't seem as hard to do as it did at the beginning of Lent. Maybe you decided, like I did, to wait a few minutes after saying grace before eating.

I learned this little mortification years ago from a priest, who helped me with spiritual direction. It goes like this: you say grace, then wait a minute. It seems pretty simple and, frankly, easy. But for me it was challenging, especially in the midst of a busy working day.  I know, maybe I'm just a big baby, but waiting that full minute seemed like forever. But when I'm working hard, especially if I'm up against a deadline and have been pushing myself, I'm not only hungry when lunch rolls around, but I'm really impatient and just want to get that food into my belly, kind of like pumping gas into my car. I need fuel! Of course, truth be told, it was just an excuse not to wait the full minute. In any case, after a long time, it wasn't a big deal anymore. I still do it, but it's really not so hard now.

So this Lent, I decided to wait three minutes - a 200% increase! And, sure enough, that was hard at first. But no longer. I've stuck to this pretty faithfully and it's worked out. Heck, there's hardly a hint of suffering in this anymore. So now I'm wondering, should I go to four minutes - you know, make it harder on myself? But when I read these wise words by Father Jacques Michel, S.J. (1712-?), I realized I was thinking about this all wrong. Here's what Father said:

“Let us rest assured, too, that we are very much mistaken, if we think that the difficulty which we experience in self-mortification, and in performing our duties for the love of God, will continue as vivid and painful as we find it in the beginning. Experience teaches us that, on merely natural principles, when we frequently perform any action, or through the assistance of divine grace accustom ourselves to act from good motives, we contract a habit of doing so which becomes easier with every repetition. Whatever difficulty at first existed gradually diminishes and finally disappears. Let us only, for a while, do violence to ourselves, and perform our actions with fidelity and exactness as to time and place, and we shall soon find that we do them, as it were, instinctively, and the religious motive seems to present itself of its own accord. So true is this that some scrupulous souls are apt to become troubled and wrongly imagine that they have no merit, because they no longer feel the sacrifice or the suffering in the duty which had cost them so much at first. They overlook the fact that it is the supernatural motive, under the instigation of grace, which gives merit to the action, and not its difficulty."

It looks like I'm just being scrupulous thinking I've got to make this waiting after grace harder now. Of course, my first reaction on reading this was that I could use some scrupulosity. But that's just me concentrating on me, when the whole point of mortification like this is to raise our hearts and minds to God. Any difficulty or suffering is just a means to do that, not an end in itself. As Father Michel explains:

"Religion, moreover, teaches us that God rewards the efforts we make to overcome ourselves, by imparting graces which not only lessen difficulties, but even cause us to derive pleasure from what was at first so painful."

So I guess I'll just stick with my discipline here and not worry about how hard or not hard it is. I'm not trying to win a contest here. Just trying to draw a tiny bit closer to God.