“Behold, now is the day of salvation!” For though there are no seasons which are not full of divine blessings, and though access to God's mercy is ever open to us by his grace, yet our minds should now be moved with all the more zeal towards spiritual progress and animated by even more confidence, for the day on which we were redeemed invites us to every kind of spiritual effort. Thus we shall keep the greatest of all mysteries, the sacrament of the Lord's Passover, with purified minds and bodies.
These great mysteries do indeed require from us an unflagging spiritual effort...
in such a way that we may stand continually in God's sight just as we ought to be found on the feast of Easter itself. But because few have this constancy, and because the stricter observance is relaxed in consideration of the frailty of the flesh... Divine Providence has with great beneficence taken care that the discipline of the forty days should heal us and restore the purity of our minds, during which the faults of other times might be redeemed by pious deeds and removed by holy fasting... So let us take care to obey the precepts of the Apostle Paul: “Let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of flesh and spirit” (2Cor 7,1).
But let our way of living harmonize with our abstinence. For our fast does not consist chiefly of mere abstinence from food, nor does it profit anything to withdraw nourishment from the body, unless the mind is called away from injustice and the tongue restrained from slandering. This is a time of gentleness and long-suffering, of peace and tranquillity...now, today, when strong-minded souls accustom themselves with determination to forgive faults, pass over insults and forget wrongs... All the same, so that this spiritual self-restraint may not be gloomy, let it be holy. No murmurs of complaint should be heard from those who are never without the consolation of holy joys.
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