Lent Was Never Meant to Be a Season

Every year, something shifts in February or March. Catholics who have been coasting through ordinary time suddenly rediscover their rosaries. Meat disappears from Friday dinner tables. People speak more quietly about what they are giving up, wearing their sacrifice with a kind of dignified restraint. There is something genuinely beautiful about this collective turning. But it is also worth examining why it takes a liturgical season to make us live like Christians.

The three pillars of Lent — prayer, fasting, and almsgiving — are not Lenten inventions. Notice how Jesus frames them in Matthew 6. He does not say if you pray, if you fast, if you give. He says when. These were assumed rhythms of a life oriented toward God, not emergency measures deployed for 40 days before being packed away with the purple vestments. Lent does not introduce us to a better way of living. It simply removes our excuses for avoiding it. In that sense, it is less a destination than a training ground, a structured space where we practise, under guidance, what we were always meant to do freely.

The uncomfortable truth is that if Lent ends and we feel relief, something has gone wrong. Not because we failed, but because we may have misunderstood what the 40 days were for. I am as guilty of this as anyone. I have finished the season feeling accomplished, only to find myself, by Pentecost, back to the same habits I had supposedly left behind. The Church, in her wisdom, does not hand us Lent so we can endure it and return to normal. She offers it so we can discover there is no going back to normal, only forward, into the weeks and months that these disciplines teach us to take seriously. Every fast, every prayer, every act of generosity is meant to leave a mark that outlasts Easter Sunday. The calendar moves on. The school does not.