 It's been a long, long day. I got a lot to say. It feels like I'm carrying a two-ton weight. I go to see a friend. Hello, I'm Monsignor Patrick Winslow. And I am Father Matthew Cout. And we are speaking from The Rooftop. A podcast brought to you by Tan Books, in which we invite you to join our conversation out here in the open air. Where we look out upon the world around us from The Rooftop of the Church and share with you what we see. Hello Father Winslow. Hello. Why are you laughing? I'm laughing because typically you say, well hello. As if I'm a surprise. Did I do that? Well hello. As if I am a surprise. If there's one thing I'm not in your life, it's a surprise probably. Well that's true. Especially since we've already been talking. That's true. At some point we just started hitting record. But good to be back with you all and just a quick thank you to Tan Books for allowing us to do this series and to get it out there for you all who are listening to our conversation. And it's good to be back with you. And they're really good people. They are. They are. It's a great organization but the people behind it, wonderful family, wonderful people that work there. So we're grateful. Indeed indeed. However today, should we discuss it? It is upon us. Yes today is the day of death. It is Ash Wednesday. And so you might have strange things coming forth from our mouths given the fact that nothing's going into our mouths. That's true. We will be perhaps even less focused. Did you come up with your penances? I've come up with yours. I have a whole laundry list for you to contemplate and consider. That's why you're here. Okay, very good. Well I think that's probably a good place to begin on what are good ideas for penances. Even though people are probably going to listen to this, they will have already started their land to begun the land. But they may need some advice because they may have to adjust or tweak some of their lentin disciplines. Yep. I think it's important just to kind of situate ourselves with the understanding of the church on this helps to give us some direction, which is that classically penances are in three forms. That we should be engaging in something relative to prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Those three kinds of penances, which are the church's traditional means of penance because they directly overturn attempt to overturn us and turn us around in the areas of the world, the flesh of the devil. So the three things that you and I all battle every single day need positive counter attacks. It's not sufficient during lent to say, you know, I'm just going to do X or I'm going to try to be kinder or I'm going to cut out gluten from my diet. Those are all fine things to do, but they're not penances per se. Right. Those are New Year's resolutions. Exactly. If we talked about those already, I'm not going to lose weight for them. These are New Year's resolutions, which we are all in support. You don't have to wait for lent to try to do improvements to your life, to increase certain disciplines and things like that. But what makes these penitential practices different in the color of lent in the preparation for Easter? And I think you probably have to go right to it. What is the whole point of lent? Of course, the history of it being those people being prepared back in the early times of the church for baptism. You have adults, families, whole households. There were several years of process for them to approach the baptismal front. Front in that last stage, they would go to this purification and enlightenment phase where they would be engaging in the almsgiving, the prayer and the fasting in a singular way oriented toward the rebirth of baptism. And the rest of the church looked upon them and said, this is healthy. It should be also for us too. Even though we've been baptized, we should also be doing something similar just to celebrate Easter. And of course, that leads to our season of lent. So really in the end, we want to end our season of lent and enter into the celebration of Easter better than when we started. Exactly. And the difficulty that I find with lent every year, as I was mentioning to you, is that part of it, one dreads, right? Because they think, okay, all the things that appeal to my sense appetite, that is to say to my body, whether it's sleep, food or drink, those things are curtailed. And so there's no way you can actually look forward to having them curtailed. No one thinks about having less food or less savory food or less drink, less sleep as something to look forward to. And so the problem with that is it sort of, in some ways, colors all of our thoughts about lent, which is part of the reason that people typically choose things that don't really hurt like giving up chocolate, which is fine when you're five, and maybe even at seven, but not when you're an adult, there's got to be something more going on here than giving up chocolate, unless it's for you. That might be just giving Father Cow a perplexed look. I think we know what his pen is. Clearly is unaware of an adult relationship with chocolate. This is true. However, that's just the sense appetite, right? That's just those things that we do penance for to grow in the virtue of temperance so as to be able to free us up to enjoy greater goods. And so the fasting is one, and it's hard to look forward to that. But the prayer and the almsgiving are something different. In other words, to look forward to actually changing the difficulty with the spiritual life, of course, is that we have an unwillingness to let ourselves go. For the most part, we sort of like the way we are. We get comfortable at some point with saying that this is a modicum of pleasure and modicum of comfort or what have you, and I'm good this way. No, we found a contented equilibrium. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't want to go any further. Right. Like I've converted enough. I don't want to lose my life. Whereas the thought that we could actually have greater joys, greater goods, as one does experience when they give alms, right? As one does experience when they learn to pray more, the cumulative effect of that time with our Lord begins to have some kind of radiance in the soul and makes you joyful. Yeah. And so all right, I will add to what you said. Feel free to disagree. Okay. But I think I could be convincing. So as you mentioned with respect to fasting, you can grow in natural virtue and disciplines, which will free you up to, as you say, to engage in practices that could help feed the soul to be applied toward your faith life. However, I think there's a way to engage fasting that has a spiritual core beyond the mere increase in the muscle of virtues. But let me say this first, so that we understand what is meant by fasting. I realize that the penitential practices are traditionally divided up into those three categories. But I think that there's a fourth category, other appendices, right? So like, if you're going to not hit your snooze, right, right, right? Okay, maybe you can shoehorn that into fasting, but it's not normally what we think of fasting, or if you're going to put a penny in your shoe, or if you're going to choose a lesser option every day, or you're going to add more salt to an item, whatever. We normally don't think of those as fasting. We don't think of them certainly as almsgiving or prayer. They're just kind of that other bucket of penances. It's corporal. Corporal works. So that's what I'm adding to the larger definition of fasting, some type of denial, some sort of penance. So if we engage in these types of penances, they can begin interiorly. In fact, I would argue that they really should, so that when I'm doing them, I can find joy in them, because there are expressions of love that I have for God. So let's just say, for example, as a penance, I've decided that I'm not going to park at any store close to the door. I'm going to always choose for the imperative length to park farthest away or relatively far away. Small little annoyance that we normally don't do, but I'm choosing this lesser option, and I'm going to do it as a discipline. Instead of being annoyed by it because I've committed myself from the front of the lens to do it, rather, when I'm doing it, I should be able to muster up a sense interiorly that this is an expression of love for God, a kiss, if you will, in His direction, and that that should bring me some joy. It's deeply interpersonal. It's interior. And it's not merely about the muscle or discipline of various virtues. Thoughts? Yeah, I certainly agree with the intention behind it, that when one does these things, it's only really terribly meritorious and fruitful if you're doing it connected to charity, where you're actually doing it as an act of love for God. And as you said, there can be really simple things. I remember one line, I would go the speed limit. Now that's, I suppose, I shouldn't go that That's not simple for you. Not going the speed limit. You can say, and I see people who are listening that that's a simple thing for you. That's a simple thing for normal people. Not a simple thing for you. I really go fast. Because you buy cars that I just, I go fast. I get into my zone and I just, but as I got older, I don't, nearly as much as I once did. But so before it was it, it's certainly a really good penance for me. So whether, and I wouldn't pass cars. And I took it as an invitation every time I got behind a slow car. I tagged it in my mind as he wants my attention. It was great. Because every time I got behind a slow car, instead of getting frustrated or angry, wanting to go around them or give them a look when you pass by, right? Like how could you be so slow? I thought, okay, he wants my attention. And I will give it to them. It was delightful. I guess all I'm saying is that prayer and almsgiving. I mean, almsgiving is tough for persons that suffer from avarice, but it's fun, right? Giving money is really exciting and in joy filled and prayer can certainly be so too and should be. Not that it's always terribly emotional, but it's glorious. And all I was all I'm attempting to get at is that the corporal penances that we do to mortify the flesh, the actual pain of that is never something that one, by definition, can look forward to. Of course. And yet it should be a means to be sure of connecting us throughout the day with God. Because it does. It reminds us. I mean, I was saying to you earlier, I never get hungrier than I do on Ash Wednesday. It's the one day I could easily go until dinner without eating and never think about it. Get busy and just don't think about it. And my body, for the most part, just rolls with it. And yet today, by 9am, I was thinking I'll never make it. So one of the things I did do is I don't eat bread during, which is kind of ironic, right? Because you think about fasting on bread and water. But bread's my favorite thing in the whole world. I just love bread in all its forms. And so I don't eat it. And Sister Mary Raefiel didn't know that. So as a little gift today, she made this incredible homemade bread and she just left it right there in front of me. It's a wonderful temptation. But men don't live on bread alone. So she's an instrument of grace. She's sanctifying me. She's making sure that you feel it. Exactly. Maybe she did know. She might have known. All right, so let's talk about some of the clever penances that you've had in your life. I mean, I can recall, for example, that I decided to want penance. I wanted to have the ability to experience the gift of the penance. Rather than just say, at the beginning of Lent, I'm not going to do this, right? I'm going to give up that and then kind of be on autopilot relative to that first offering. I wanted to feel the offering on a daily basis. So one time I said, all right, well, as you know, we pray the divine office and we have daytime prayer. And the daytime prayer is a very flexible hour. It can be mid-morning. It could be afternoon. It could be mid-afternoon. So I said, well, I'm not going to eat. I'm going to fast and food all through Lent until I pray the afternoon prayer. Or whether it was if I needed to, I could do the mid-morning. Gosh, you could do pretty much after morning prayer. Or I could do the afternoon or I could do it in the later afternoon. But I had every single day a choice to make. And I tended, more often than not, to choose a later times. There was an ability to make the offering every single day because I had that flex. Whereas if I had said, I'm not going to eat until noon every single day, I won't have anything. It wouldn't have had the same experience of offering. Yeah, that's a great idea to have something that continuously draws out from you and act of the will. I mean, autopilot is the sort of nadir of the spiritual life, right? To not be intentional about these things. I think one of my favorite ones, I've had a lot of, I enjoy coming up with interesting things. Tailoring them. Tailoring them. One that was really hard for me at first, but became such a joy, is I remember one year I decided that I was going to, in the guest room in the rectory when I was a pastor, I made up a little pallet on the floor. Like I was, you know, camping kind of a thing. And just frankly, to do penance for the fact that I've probably abused sleep on a thousand occasions, you know, slept in or hit my alarm too much or didn't get up or had too much comfort or whatever, just I felt like I was getting super soft in that arena. And I thought, and you know me, that's more my character to go for those sorts of things. And I had to be in that by nine o'clock. That was so hard. Really? Because it's a place I don't want to be, i.e. on the floor in my little nest. And I had to be there by nine o'clock when I'm not tired typically, at least back then. Now I'm nine o'clock's great. No problem. But back then, you know, if I went to bed before 11, it was like, it was sort of a miracle. And then of course, I would get up at every the early time irrespective of whether the alarm was going off because I was going to bed at night. But what it did for me, which I guess we kind of have built into the seminary life here anyway, but what it did for me back then when I was by myself in the parish is that AI didn't waste tons of time doing things that were just sort of useless because you don't really want to engage in anything good. At that time, usually want to sort of unwind. But I also read a good really good novel. And so I within a few days, I really looked forward to the whole experience. Interesting. And it felt like I was doing something without I had to say it like this is going to sound so corny. But I felt like I was camping with our Lord. Here's our little thing. I'm going to go camping reading this great book about the life of a priest. And it was a great novel. And so it was just spending time with him and falling asleep early. That was one of my favorite penances. I've not been able to reproduce. Well, that's great. Yeah, because you can't reproduce that time in your life either. So if you try to do it the next year the same, it's not quite the same. Right. And yeah, I'm thinking of what other unique penances like for example, I like these ones where I can have that sense of offering where I can experience it rather than just have that discipline the whole time. Yeah. And I remember saying, All right, every day, I'm going to choose one lesser option. So if I was going somewhere and I would normally order a soda, I'd get water. Yeah. Or if I wanted a burger, I wouldn't get the burger. Yeah. Or it would be parking farthest away from the front door of the grocery stores have to lug everything out. Just throwing in there every day, choose a lesser option. And it was interesting because there was a type of vigilance about it that was different than the vigilance of say, just giving up meat. Yeah, we're giving up meat sacrifice. You can give it up for the whole of line. But it's a different type of vigilance, right? You're not looking for what I can give. You're actually just making sure I don't put meat in my mouth. Whereas in the in the other scenario where you're choosing a lesser option every day, you're just looking for that opportunity. And again, you can flex more. You can make a bigger offering. Yeah. I really appreciate those types of penances. I do too. I think part of the reason is that it puts you in a in a right relationship with with God in the sense that the temptation for them always is if you don't have something firm, then it'll fall to the way the entirety of Lent becomes, yes, sort of, I'll get to that here. Maybe not. And nothing ever really happens. Nothing ever happens. You make concessions the whole time or whatever. So I'd like to start out with some things that are baseline firm that I don't have to question. I don't have to engage. But then I also like to have those that make me actively engaging God to, as you say, make acts of the will. And I think the reason I like it is because you really create something in the course of 40 days. Only you are dealing with him. Right. There's an intimacy to it. Yeah. And no one really knows about it. It's just the two of you. No, it's really it's your father who sees in secret gets a chance to reward you, so to speak, by virtue of the intimacy that's created. I think that was the gospel today, wasn't it? Yeah. I was thinking about yesterday, I was reading the text of the extraordinary form of Ville Mass. And I love seeing the way the church's history is so incredibly interesting to me. For example, the penitents are the ones who used to put the ashes on their heads, right? And they would be expunged from the church for the season of Lent. And then, as you say, then everyone began to do it. It wasn't just it, but it was for those who had to do public penance in the early days, in addition to the persons that were preparing for, preparing for baptism. And so the texts and the collics and the various things of the mass always have some flavor, some mineral in the water that they picked up while rolling over this particular age. And so, for example, in the beginning of what was called Septuagesima, when you kind of had a pre-Lent, right? A ramp up to Lent, 70 days, 60 days, 50 days, then 40. And in that pre-Lent, there's all these churches. The church, as you probably know, recall that in the old Missal, there was basically every single day of the year had an assigned church in Rome, where the Pope would go with the Curia to offer mass. He wouldn't necessarily go, but there was a church, a station church for that, which is still very popular in Rome to this day, during Lent, but not the rest of the season. But you can pick up, for example, and I think it was Septuagesima Sunday, where it makes reference to beseeching the intercession of St. Paul, because that day they were out at St. Paul's. So those kind of things are sort of fun. But I noticed the Communion Antiphon that just happens to float down into Fat Tuesday is, I just thought it was great. It was, and they all ate and were filled, as if the church was sort of tracking with us on that. And yet today, the readings that are given, at least in the Nebus Ordo, very much about creating that sort of intimacy with God, not allowing yourself to be, to do this for someone else, much less even for yourself. Right. Right. It's first and foremost the interior. It's about him. Movement. And all the things that we do have some exterior manifestation. We can't avoid that, but we certainly don't want to call attention to it and we try to minimize the impact they may have on others. So, all right, before we go, thoughts? Well, it's not really much of a thought, I suppose, but one thing I've been rather fascinated by lately is I want to know, I want to know where I live. It sounds kind of obvious. Did you look at a map? I want to know the things that are around me that have been here forever. Like, I want to know all the trees. I want to know the rocks are there. I want to know its history. I've been really interested recently as the foliage is beginning to bud already. It's early this year. I've paid attention all year to the kinds of trees that are on the property, because I've never done that before. Like, I've lived my whole life not knowing what tree is what. That's kind of an odd deficiency. Like, people point to trees, I like that tree. What kind of tree is that? I have no idea. So, you're calling me deficient. I've begun to learn them. And by virtue of doing that, I know what ones are doing different things. And the coolest tree that I think we have on the property, for me anyway, is the beach tree. It's got such a cool leaf, because on the back side, it's like leather. On the other side, it's really smooth and beautiful. But I fell in love with that tree over the summer. And then I realized that the only leaves that are left from last year are the beach tree leaves. They stay on all winter long. And they have a golden hue to them. Really interesting. But it's something all my life, I'm sure I've been around beach trees all my life. And I've never noticed. They become green at some point, right? Well, they're green in the summer, but they turn this sort of brownish gold, all like Loughlorian, in the wintertime. And so, when you look into the trees, are they thinned out at all? Are there leaves? Oh, yeah, they're very thinned out. But there are a few. I mean, they're pretty full. And so, if you look into a dead forest during wintertime, you'll see this flash of color, even though it's a muted color, and it's always the beach. I thought that's very kind of the beach, especially since it was my favorite tree over the summer, that it perduers all the way through winter. Well, very attentive. I think so. Well, I think I'll offer some practical counsel on the lent front. And I think you and I have talked about this in the past. I know we have. That if whatever lent and discipline that you've adopted tends to make the world around you miserable, you just need to stop. Yeah. You just have to put that down. It's like going to the gym and putting too much weight on the bar. I get it. You want to be a spiritual Hulk? Great. Love the desire. But you can't lift that bar without hurting someone else. And in the end, yourself as well. You're making yourself miserable and making everyone around you miserable. So, you need to be able to work up maybe one day to be able to do that penance, but this isn't the year. Without making everyone else miserable. Exactly. So, switch it up. Things have to be manageable. You need to be able to joyfully, even if it's with some pain and discomfort, because that's what the nature of these types of things are. But you be a interiorly find a certain type of contentment and expression of love toward God, a little bit of joy that comes from loving God that much should be able to be experienced such that the fruit of your penance is something very positive and grace filled as opposed to something miserable and grouchy. Amen. Good. So, now I can imagine husband and wives going to tell the other one. Yeah. I can imagine. Father's Winslow and Cow said, you need to knock it off because you are making me miserable. Or I can find, I could also see husband and wife saying, guess what? We don't have to do this penance anymore because making us miserable. Again, there's always a little bit of misery with every bit of penance. Yeah. But it should make everyone else miserable. It should make everyone else miserable. And interiorly, it shouldn't, honestly, it shouldn't be crushing your soul. This should be something that I think has the right spirit of charity, of love, affection for God that can be embraced as a gift. And not of how much can I endure. We have a friend who likes to say, this is not the spiritual Olympics, folks. Yeah, but it's used as an excuse not to do any penance. There's another one. There's always next year. There's always next year. That's it. Until there's not. Until there isn't. All right. Very good. Well, we pray for you all and hope you have a fantastic start to lend and persevere in charity. Have a great week. Thanks for listening to this episode of From the Rooftop. For updates about new episodes, special guests, and exclusive deals for From the Rooftop listeners, sign up at rooftoppodcast.com. And remember, for more great ways to deepen your faith, check out all the spiritual resources available at tanbooks.com. And we'll see you again next time From the Rooftop.