Lent Is the Perfect Time To Conquer Your Selfish Desires

Pope St Leo the Great said, "As we approach then the beginning of Lent, ... let us prepare our souls for fighting with temptations".

From Aleteia

By Philip Kosloski

The more we conquer our selfish desires, the more likely we will be able to direct our thoughts towards God.

Few of us like to admit that we are selfish. We tend to keep a pearly image of ourselves, thinking that we really aren't that bad of a person.

While we may not be a murderer or a thief, we likely are tempted to be prideful and sometimes think that our way is the best way possible.

Whatever selfish tendency we may have, Lent remains a perfect time to work on those lower qualities of our personality and strive to focus our attention more on God.

Conquering our inner demons during Lent

St. Leo the Great gives his reasoning in a homily as to why we need to take advantage of Lent as a time of personal spiritual renewal:

For we have many encounters with our own selves: the flesh desires one thing against the spirit, and the spirit another thing against the flesh. And in this disagreement, if the desires of the body be stronger, the mind will disgracefully lose its proper dignity, and it will be most disastrous for that to serve which ought to have ruled.

We often forget that we are a body-soul composite being, which means that what we do with our bodies affects our souls. If we are selfish in our desires and let them rule, then our soul will suffer and we will have a difficult time resisting temptation.

St. Leo the Great then explains that if we are able to subdue our inner passions, we will be able to conquer those temptations and rightly order our lives:

But if the mind, being subject to its Ruler, and delighting in gifts from above, shall have trampled under foot the allurements of earthly pleasure, and shall not have allowed sin to reign in its mortal body, reason will maintain a well-ordered supremacy, and its strongholds no strategy of spiritual wickednesses will cast down: because man has then only true peace and true freedom when the flesh is ruled by the judgment of the mind, and the mind is directed by the will of God.

He then goes on to write, "As we approach then, dearly-beloved, the beginning of Lent, which is a time for the more careful serving of the Lord, because we are, as it were, entering on a kind of contest in good works, let us prepare our souls for fighting with temptations, and understand that the more zealous we are for our salvation, the more determined must be the assaults of our opponents."

If we are to do anything during Lent, let us seek to stamp out our selfish tendencies by rightly ordering our lives, letting God rule over us with his loving compassion.