10 Quotes from St. Josemaria on Suffering and Mortification

Are you ready for Lent to start next week?

An important part of this liturgical season – and all of our lives as Christians – is the focus on offering up suffering for special intentions, as penance, and to become more holy. Here are 10 quotes to guide your prayer as we look forward to uniting our fasting and abstinence to Jesus’ cross. 

1. “If you don’t deny yourself, you will never be a soul of prayer.” (The Way, 172)
2. “Don’t say: ‘That person gets on my nerves.’ Think: ‘That person sanctifies me.” (The Way, 174)
3. “Christ is nailed to the Cross. And you? … Still taken up with your whims and fancies – or rather, nailed by them!” (The Forge, 761)
4. “Choose mortifications that don’t mortify others.” (The Way, 179)
5. “The world admires only spectacular sacrifice, because it does not realize the value of sacrifice that is hidden and silent.” (The Way, 185)
6. “It is not the spirit of penance to do great mortifications on some days, and nothing on others. —The spirit of penance means knowing how to overcome yourself every single day, offering up both great and small things for love, without putting on show.” (The Forge, 784)
7. “We cannot, we must not, be sugar-candy Christians: on earth there must be suffering and the Cross.” (The Forge, 761)
8. “I will tell you which are man’s treasures on earth so that you will appreciate them: hunger, thirst, heat, cold, pain, dishonor, poverty, loneliness, betrayal, slander, prison…” (The Way, 194)
9. “The heroic minute. It is the time fixed for getting up. Without hesitation: a supernatural reflection and… up! The heroic minute: here you have a mortification that strengthens your will and does no harm to your body.” (The Way, 206)
10. “With you, Jesus, what joy in suffering, what light in darkness!” (The Way, 229)