Most of us learn faith through practices. We learn how to pray, fast, give, confess, discipline ourselves. These practices matter. They steady lives that might otherwise dissolve into distraction and noise.
Yet there are moments — often quiet ones — when unease slips in. A sense that, sincere as our efforts may be, something deeper is stirring beneath them. We keep the fast. We say the prayers. And still, something whispers that faith has not yet reached its final form.
Lent intensifies this whisper. Beneath its call to repentance lies a subtler invitation: not only to turn from obvious wrongdoing, but to examine what we imagine faith is for.
Much of our faith life revolves around improvement. We hope to be forgiven. We hope to be saved. These hopes are not wrong. Yet there may come a point when even these noble concerns feel insufficient.
What if faith is not primarily about securing our own spiritual future?
In “Report to Greco,” Nikos Kazantzakis recounts asking an elderly monk of Mount Athos whether he still struggled with the devil. In youth, the monk responds, he had wrestled fiercely with temptation. Now both he and the devil had grown old and weary. They left one another alone.
Was it easier now?
No, it was worse!
The struggle had changed. Now he wrestled with God — and he hoped to lose.
Spiritual maturity, he suggests, does not lead to mastery, but to dispossession. Not to triumph, but to consent. The struggle shifts from resisting sin to relinquishing control. Lent, then, may not simply correct behaviour; it may unsettle the architecture of our faith.
Kazantzakis echoes this in his literary portrait of St. Francis, describing the spiritual life as a mountain ascent. The climber strains upward toward clarity and union. Yet just when the summit seems near, a voice interrupts: “Jump.” And the command recurs whenever security settles in. Let go. Relinquish even this.
The mountain is not conquered. It is abandoned.
What must be surrendered is not only weakness, but the subtler satisfaction of having progressed. Wrestling with temptation allows us to measure ourselves. Wrestling with God removes the measure altogether. The leap is not into certainty, but into trust stripped of guarantees.
This movement unfolds within each of us. Most of our prayers quite naturally begin with ourselves: for health, protection, forgiveness, assurance. Such petitions are human. Yet even the hope of salvation can carry an unspoken centre — my peace, my security, my future with God.
The Christian tradition does not condemn this stage. It simply refuses to let us remain there.
At some point, faith asks whether even the longing to be saved must be purified — not denied, but freed from its self-reference. The question shifts from, “Will I be saved?” to something more generous: “Can my life become a place where mercy passes through?”
Long before I had language for this, I remember kneeling at daily Mass as a child and praying that God would lay all the world’s suffering on me so that no one else would suffer. Today that prayer sounds naïve, perhaps reckless. I was young. Yet I cannot dismiss it. Something in that young heart intuited that love longs not merely to be spared, but to substitute itself.
I would not encourage a child to pray that way. But I wonder whether that strange longing, purified and tempered, lies at the root of every saintly life.
Perhaps what Lent asks of us then is not heroism, but wakefulness, the sort that St. Paul urges the Romans to embrace. The danger is not disbelief; it is sleep. We move through life — even our devotions — half-aware. To wake up is to notice how easily faith becomes self-protection — and how gently God invites us beyond it.
The monk hopes to lose. Francis hears the command to jump. A child dares to absorb what he cannot carry. None of this is heroic in the ordinary sense. It is love loosening its grip.
Perhaps Lent unsettles us because it exposes not only our sins, but our securities. It invites faith to mature beyond spiritual achievement, beyond the quiet assurance of being saved.
Perhaps salvation is not something we secure, but something we surrender into. Not something we possess, but something that slowly re-centres us.
And perhaps the deeper form of faith is found not when we finally feel safe — but when we are willing, at last, to let go.
