I'm not there.
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I love that title of the Dylan song and the film by the same name. It impressed me the other day while at Target, looking for a film to buy. People say, "Why buy films, just rent them." Yeah, but I have to return them if I rent them - and I'm not good about returning things - I forget and lose them - which explains why I do not have a library card. BTW - I bought Marley and Me, because a friend said it was good - hated it - schmaltz-o-rama! Jennifer Anniston cannot act, I stopped watching midway through the film. I also bought the new and revised Brideshead - I haven't watched it yet. I know I will say, 'I liked the old one better.' But I digress - I mention all this just to explain how I got to use the title of Bob Dylan's song and how it seemed to fit me in some ways... too private to discuss.
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Do what you feel... Feel until the end...
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Anyway. This post is about mortification, denying one's very self... a mandate for following Christ - in other words, to be a Christian. That sense is lost on modern men, especially in our day. Sometimes a person must indeed deny his very self to be saved. People don't believe that however - one must actualize oneself - fulfill oneself to find happiness.
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Years ago when I returned to the sacraments, a friend of mine told me, "You think you have to give things up for Christ, that you have to suffer..." I didn't really know how to answer her, suffering or penance was never my focus - Jesus was my focus, and I gladly renounced what was contrary to the Gospel to know Him... "considering everything as loss", as St. Paul affirmed. Ironically, my friend has never yet returned to the Church, and though she lives well, and is financially successful, she suffers a great deal emotionally as well as morally. She denies herself all sorts of things in order to remain thin and chic. As a child she was sexually abused, the effects of which she never resolved. Subsequently she has difficulty trusting men and maintaining a relationship, although she is involved sexually with a man who happens to be married, the sex is always degrading and never loving, and there are months between each encounter where she anguishes over his lack of interest in her. That is suffering.
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We all suffer.
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"Mortification may be defined a the struggle against our evil inclinations in order to subject them to the will and to the will of God. It is not so much a virtue as an ensemble of virtues - the first degree of all the virtues - which consists in overcoming the obstacles that stand in the way so as to restore our faculties their lost balance and reestablish among them their right order. Thus it is easily seen that mortification is not an end in itself but a means to an end... the end of mortification is union with God.
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There is a kind of mortification which is necessary for salvation in this sense, that if we fail to practice it, we run the risk of falling into mortal sin.
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The threefold concupiscence that remains with us, spurred on by the world and the devil, often inclines us to evil and endangers our salvation, unless we take heed to mortify it." - Tanquerey, Spiritual Life: Part II, Chapter III, 754 - 755
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"These are not simply pious thoughts, indeed, "If we desire true happiness on earth there is no better way than to cultivate piety (godliness) which as St. Paul says, 'is profitable to all things, having promise of life that now is and of that which is to come.' ( Tim. IV: 8) Peace of soul, the joy of a good conscience, the happiness of union with God, of growing in his love, of effecting a closer intimacy with Christ, such are a few of the rewards which, along with the comforting hope of life eternal, God dispenses even now to his faithful servants in the midst of their trials." - Spiritual Life: Part I, Chapter IV, 364
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