Lenten Penance . . . again

Apparently, someone still stops by The Inn every once in a while.  In re: the first "Lenten Penance" post below I have been cited here "as it might be relevant".

And so it is.   Herewith a bit from an editorial in The Magnficat quoting Msgr Ronald Knox:

The effect of this, he observed, is the experience we are familiar with and which we have come to take as a sine qua non of the season of Lent: a “gratifying sense of irritation.” We’re supposed to give something up, we’re supposed to feel the pinch. “Such is our human make-up that a deliberate abstention, though it be only from sweets or the cinema, pricks like a hairshirt. Which is why the forty days of Lent seem to pass so slowly; will it never be Easter Day? And no doubt it is good for us.”

But it was Monsignor’s next point that really stuck with me: “in a curious way, this impression Lent makes on us is the exact opposite of what the Church intends. Lent ought to pass like a flash, with a sense of desperate hurry. ‘Good heavens! The second Sunday already, and still so little to show for it!’ Lent is the sacramental expression of the brief life we spend here, a life of probation, without a moment in it we can afford to waste. That is why it begins with Saint Paul’s metaphor of an ambassador delivering an ultimatum; we have only a few ‘days of grace’ to make our peace with God. Ash Wednesday recalls our ignominious, earthy origins, Easter looks forward to our eternity. The space between is not, if we look at it properly, a sluggish declension; it is a mill-race…. If only we could cheat ourselves into the feeling that these forty days were our last, how quickly they would run their course!”

More here.