How can religious grow in their spirit of self-sacrifice for the sake of the Kingdom?

The Church, in her wisdom, challenges and encourages religious to ponder deeply our relationship with God, our need for conversion, and the means by which to move toward a closer union with God. In Starting Afresh from Christ #12, our Holy Father reminds religious that “in addition to the life giving thrust, capable of witness and self-sacrifice to the point of martyrdom, consecrated life also experiences the insidiousness of mediocrity in the spiritual life, of the progressive taking on of middle class values and of a consumer mentality…Consecrated persons are not alone in living the tension between secularism and an authentic life of faith, between the fragility of humanity itself and the power of grace; this is the experience of all members of the Church.”

We hear the voice of Christ in the words of the psalmist: “I looked for one that would grieve together with me, but there was none.” Father Van Zeller, in his book Approach to Penance, emphasizes that consecrated souls are called to make a response of love to this cry from the Cross through lives of personal self-sacrifice and of suffering accepted in the name of Christ. Religious thereby share in the lot of the Eldest Son (p. 21-23). Since humanity’s first sin encompassed body and soul, he must be rescued body and soul. “Man was fashioned body and soul, fell body and soul, is redeemed body and soul, will find his full and ultimate happiness body and soul” (ibid. 43).

Hence, corporal mortification of some sort is necessary because though the body is designed to serve the spirit, temptation usually enters the spirit through the body. Through a life wholeheartedly disposed to self-sacrifice for the sake of the Kingdom, religious can say that in their bodies they make present the “dying and rising of Christ.” But how can religious counteract the voices of secular society that direct individuals toward a form of “self-fulfillment” that seeks to realize itself independently of God? If the focus is on oneself, the attempt is hopeless. But St. Paul gives us great reason for hope in his first letter to the Corinthians. He tells us that [we] have been consecrated in Christ Jesus and called to be a holy people. In another letter he assures us that as sons in the Son, we have access to “every spiritual grace in the heavens.”

Truly this is great reason for hope! So how do we break open this treasury of grace that falls to us as a result of the suffering, death and Resurrection of Christ? St. Paul, once again gives us the answer in his letter to the Romans: “We are heirs of God, heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with Him so as to be glorified with Him.” Yet what does this suffering entail? Is it a multiplication of penitential acts and austerities? While these are valid expressions of self-sacrifice, the key is to suffer “with” Christ.

In its truest form, self-sacrifice is a healthy expression of a heart that is in love. Self-sacrifice “does not depend on careful planning nor does it demand gritted teeth and the heroic stance; it simply demands surrender.” The end of mortification is God not more penances. In other words, self-sacrifice must have its roots in charity, not in austerity. Austerity will accompany the growth of a disposition of self-sacrifice, but it will be a by-product rather than an essential fruit. A certain austerity will even be a sign of a genuinely self-sacrificing person, but it will not be an infallible sign nor the only one. The infallible signs are humility and charity (Van Zeller, p. 3).

The charity which inflames the soul is most clearly manifested through the surrender of the soul to God, by which is renounced the claim upon oneself. One is thereby handing over to God his personal rights, and what independence he has enjoyed until now, thereby placing himself where he belongs – in the hands of God, and subjecting the events in his life to the unqualified control of grace (ibid. 5). Hence, the matter in question is not what to give next, or even how to give more, but simply how to go on in the disposition of letting God take. If we go on saying, “I give you this…I give you that” we are liable to add the thought: “See what a good person I am.” Here the emphasis tends to shift from the “you” to the “I.” “I am doing all this for you…you should feel greatly complimented by this attention” (ibid. 7). If we really take seriously St. Paul’s words “I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me,” then we could accordingly say: “I suffer, now not I, but Christ suffers in me…I sacrifice, now not I, but Christ sacrifices in me.”

Thus, in deciding to undertake a penitential way of life, a man’s motive must be to please God (and not to tell God what type of sacrifice he would like to have from us). In so doing, the consecrated person will find that he is often called upon to bear crosses of a different shape from those he had bargained for. The moment of grace comes when religious become deeply convinced that the really effective part of the sacrifice is not to be found in what he does in the way of self-denial but in what God does in the way of reproducing the Passion in his everyday life…For the religious, this means submitting to the Passion; this means submitting voluntarily to the discipline of suffering (ibid. pp.7-13)... “In the light of his prayer and his desire to re-live the Christ-life in the setting of his own life [the consecrated soul] will see that it is not the hardness of the work which God wants but the love which inspires it. If God wants hardness as well as love, he will arrange for the work to be hard. The first concern from our point of view is to make sure of love. Hardness does not cover a multitude of sins; love does. Hardness is not the bond of perfection; love is” (p. 21