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How Can Denial of Pleasure Help Us In Today’s World

It is Lent a time for giving and searching your heart for God.  Why do we give up things for Lent, how does that help us to be better Christians?  I firmly believe that denial of pleasures of any sort helps one to be a better Christian and perhaps a better American.  I look back on my life and honestly believe that if I had denied myself certain things I would have been better off today as a person.

So often we look for many solutions to our problems in magazines and on TV.  We look for the quick fix to our weight problems and lack of exercise, or hair or what ever our fault may be.  If the body part does not fit or is too small or ugly we look for the quick solution.  An operation or a dooma flicky.  Think of all the money we could save and put back into that 401 K if we could just go to our medicine cabinet or gadget closet and get cash for all those quick fix solutions we paid for.  We would be rich!  We would not be thinking of getting that second job and we would be on a beach in the South Pacific rather then sitting some where in Bloomington, Illinois in 12 degree weather.  Let us face it as American Catholics we are the consumers of the quick fix.

Where does denial come in?  Where does denial of my pleasure come in? Well think about it.  If we could deny our selves from reaching for the convenient cell phone to text my bff to let him know I just clipped my toenails, if I just denied myself the pleasure of letting him know that, I would have saved the .20 cents.  That money adds up, so much so employers around the country are denying text messaging to their employees.  On the more serious side, think of the things we give ourselves on a daily basis.  Eating out for lunch, that extra cup at Starbucks, or the movie you saw with the kids.  Now if you learn to deny yourself these pleasures, it will teach you that you can do with out them!  It is all about self discipline, a concept that our society did not learn before this economic crisis. 

Perhaps we would not be in this crisis today if we only learned about denial during Lent.  Denial of the pleasures can be applied to our spiritual lives.  It teaches about the sacrifices that Jesus went through.  Through denial you can put yourself in our Saviors shoes.  You can relive the Stations of the Cross with our savior and learn what suffering he had to go through.  Denial strengthens our faith and allows us to make sacrifices and be grateful for what we have.

Through my personal experiences with denial I have learned a great deal about my failures in my life and have come to the conclusion that my recent failures are actually aiding me in my present day successes.  In other words I had to fail to succeed.  I have changed my out look on life.  I no longer look at denying myself that color plasma TV as a failure, rather I look at that as character building, a lesson that many of our kids still need to learn. In  an era where you can talk to people by just whipping out a cell phone and email someone at a push of a button, our kids have no concept of how to be disciplined, they lack patience, a virtue in itself.  They look at denial of pleasure as road block not as virtue.  As adults we need to concentrate on this and slow the world down for our kids.  We need to teach them that they need to wait for the good things in life.

How do you conquer your desires?  Simply say a prayer to help you.  Pray to our Lord everyday. Many Priests’ would recommend you take up the rosary.  Expressing your self in this manner would ease your desires and help you overcome anything in your way from becoming more spiritual. Do not have the time to say a whole rosary? Say ten hail Mary’s and an Our Father.  Do this religiously and you will be able to overcome anything. For example if you are having a problem with over eating.  Have that pie and then pray.  Say the rosary after you have that pie.  The Lord will listen to your pleas for help and soon you will learn to deny yourself that extra pie.

Think of this America; if we had this patience, if we had the ability to deny ourselves pleasure, would we be suffering now?  We do not even possess the patience to wait for the economy to get better.

God Bless

Vern Paul Hee

Catholicamericatoday.net

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