Replacing Disorder At Work With Order Through Mortification

Mortification helps us replace disorder with order at work. Of course, this applies to our whole life, but our focus in these posts is the workplace.

Our last three posts provided some advice that could seem too difficult or even in some instances impossible to incorporate into our work day. But read correctly, thoughtfully, we can see our way to the truth: There's no reason to consider anything that benefits our spiritual life to be inapplicable to our thoughts, words, and actions in the workplace.

With this in mind, we turn to mortification - a subject we've discussed many times over the years. In one way, it's easier for us to apply mortification to our work day. It can be something simple like delaying eating our lunch for a couple of minutes after saying grace. And we can do this even during a business lunch - something some of us have to participate in from time to time. 

Mortification can extend to such items as holding our tongue if tempted to criticize others; or maybe never giving a second thought to office gossip. We could go on, but ideally you get the point here. Mortification blends easily with our work - it can and it should.

To better understand the spiritual motivation and benefit of mortification, we turn to Fr. Edward Leen today. His spiritual writing is typically denser than others. But if we take our time and pay attention, the benefit will be proportionate to the denseness.

And it directly explains why we should be vigilant about disorder in our work life, and how we can and why we should counter it. 

To wit:   

Mortification
Fr. Edward Leen, C.S.Sp.

“Mortification aims at the rectification of disorder in our fallen nature, so that it may be replaced by that order in which sense is subject to reason and reason to God. By His Grace, Jesus Christ gave us power to recover, in a certain measure, this rectitude of our nature. The function of mortification is to enable us to ‘strip ourselves of the old man with his deeds, and to put on the new, who is renewed unto knowledge, according to the image of Him who created him.’ Mortification aims at replacing disorder by order, revolt against God and reason by subjection to Christ and His faith, disordered nature by vivifying grace, and self-indulgence by purity and justice. 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. 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. Mortification is an essential law of Christianity, a consequence of our incorporation with Christ. There is no possibility of receiving His life in our members, unless the activity of corrupt nature in those members is paralyzed by self-inflicted privation. For mortification in its exercise involves the privation not only of unlawful satisfaction but even of those which in themselves are reasonable and legitimate.”