Opportunity often presents itself as gift. Lent is one of those gifts — though not the kind most of us are conditioned to recognize, let alone welcome.
It arrives at an awkward moment. Christmas has barely receded into memory. The decorations are gone, the music has faded, and the calendar insists we move on. And yet the Church places another gift in our hands. Not wrapped in sentiment or softened by nostalgia but bound instead in something rougher and more demanding. Ashes. Silence. Discipline.
This is not a gift to be torn open all at once. Lent asks to be unwrapped slowly, deliberately, over 40 days. If we resist the urge to rush — or to quit when it stops entertaining us — we may find ourselves genuinely startled by Easter. God-smacked, even. What we discover inside the package is not something new, but something we quietly assumed was lost: ourselves as God intended us to be, ourselves as Christ already sees us.
That is the good news.
The harder news is that many will not make the journey, not because Lent is inaccessible or outdated, but because it requires something modern life trains us to avoid: discipline. We are told repeatedly that what we need is motivation — a feeling, a spark, a reason compelling enough to keep us going. But Lent is not sustained by motivation. Motivation flickers. Discipline endures.
Time quickly becomes the excuse. We are too busy to pray, too tired to fast, too overwhelmed to give. Some may shake the box once or twice, peering at Lent with mild curiosity, but without the patience to keep unwrapping when it fails to gratify. And so the gift remains unopened, misunderstood or quietly set aside.
Which raises a serious question: Do the traditional Lenten practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving still hold up in a fragmented, chaotic, violent and often nihilistic world?
The answer — uncomfortably — is yes. But not in the way many of us have learned to practice them.
Lent is not about external improvements or spiritual accessories. It is not a coat we put on for six weeks and hang back in the closet. It is not cosmetic enhancement for the soul or religious self-improvement designed to make us appear respectable. The prophets had little patience for that sort of piety, and the Gospel readings for Ash Wednesday make clear that Jesus is no more impressed by it than Isaiah was.
Lent is not about looking holy. It is about becoming whole.
Carl Jung once wrote that “the privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” That line resonates because it names a hunger we all recognize, even if we rarely articulate it. Lent is the Church’s annual insistence that this privilege has not expired. You are still being given the chance — this Lent, this Ash Wednesday — to become who you truly are.
Prayer, then, is not religious performance but attention: learning again how to stand honestly before God without distraction or disguise. Fasting is not punishment but clarity: stripping away what dulls our hunger so that we can feel again what really matters. Almsgiving is not generosity theatre but reorientation: a refusal to allow suffering to remain abstract or safely distant.
Taken together, these practices do not shrink us. They enlarge us. They return us to ourselves.
This is why Lent feels uncomfortable. Becoming always does. It asks us to let go of habits, illusions and narratives that no longer serve life. It exposes how easily we confuse comfort with freedom and sentiment with faith. And yet precisely here — in the discipline, the slowness, the honesty — the gift reveals itself.
Lent is not about deprivation for its own sake. It is about giving ourselves over to the patient work of transformation. It is about remembering who we are and whose we are. It is, finally, about trusting that God desires our becoming even more than we do.
Unwrap the gift slowly. Stay with it when novelty fades. Let discipline do what motivation cannot.
Have a great Lent — not because it is easy, but because it is real.
Lee Purcell is an educator and writer who teaches communication studies in Northwest Indiana and writes on faith, culture and spiritual formation in contemporary life. He is a graduate of CCN’s journalism summer seminar.
