Lent arrives quietly—ashes on foreheads, habits interrupted, the world slowing down just enough to notice. My first Ash Wednesday as an adult, I was living in Chennai, riding the local train to college after an early service. I had forgotten about the smudge until I caught my reflection in the window. A man across from me was staring—not hostile, just aware. I almost wiped it off. I did not. I am still not entirely sure why. Maybe I wanted to be the kind of person who did not wipe it off.
That is the thing about Lent—it announces something before you are ready to explain it, even to yourself.
You Can’t Love What You Don’t See
Lent gives us three practices: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. They sound medieval. A friend once called them “the big three,” like pharmaceutical companies. But they are really just forms of attention.
Prayer is turning toward God instead of your own spiraling thoughts. Fasting is noticing what you reach for when you are anxious or bored or lonely. Almsgiving is looking outward, which is harder than it sounds.
I did not understand fasting until I gave up my phone for the first hour of each morning. Not the whole day—I am not a monk. Just the first hour.
The first week, I failed constantly. My hand would reach for it before I was fully awake. Checking for what? Nothing had happened while I was asleep. No emergencies. No news that could not wait. Yet I would already be scrolling, letting my attention scatter before I had even made coffee.
When I finally managed to leave it in another room, the silence felt aggressive. I stood in my kitchen unsure what to do with my hands. I caught myself walking toward the phone repeatedly, like muscle memory reaching for a phantom limb.
That was when I realized how little attention I had been paying—to anything. Including myself.
We live in an economy of managed distraction. Algorithms know what keeps us clicking—outrage, sentimentality, anything that shortcuts thinking. Even compassion gets performed. We share the article, sign the petition, feel briefly righteous, and move on. Nothing changes, but we feel involved.
Lent cuts through that. It insists love cannot grow where attention is constantly divided. And most of us are living so fragmented we barely register as present.
What Fasting Actually Does
Here is what nobody tells you: fasting does not suppress desire. It exposes it.
Give something up and you discover what it was doing for you. Not just coffee or sugar or social media, but the anxiety it managed, the boredom it covered, the questions it helped you avoid.
One Lent in my twenties, I gave up coffee because I knew I depended on it too much. The headaches were unpleasant. Worse was the afternoon crash when I could no longer override my body’s signals. I had to actually feel tired. I had to admit I had been pushing past limits for years.
Lent does not shame that. It simply makes you look at it. What are you really hungry for?
We treat love like indulgence now—more is better, boundaries are oppressive, saying no is unkind. But Lent suggests something unsettling: discipline might actually be care. Restraint might be affection.
My four-year-old nephew once demanded candy for breakfast. When my sister refused, he saw only cruelty. She saw something better for him than what he wanted in the moment.
I suspect Lent does that to us. Not in a patronizing way, but in a way that asks whether what we crave is truly what we need.
Love Costs, But We’ve Made It Cheap
Almsgiving sits at the heart of Lent, and I find it the most uncomfortable. It is easy to do it badly.
Real love costs something. Charity that never inconveniences you remains abstract. Automatic monthly donations are good and necessary, but they rarely rearrange your life.
Lent asks for the kind of giving you feel. The kind that adjusts your budget or schedule. Not for display, but because it matters enough to cost you something.
And then Lent complicates it further. It does not let you feel morally superior. Giving is not about being better; it is about solidarity. About recognizing shared fragility.
But it also pushes harder. Why does this suffering exist in the first place? Why are we encouraged to be privately generous while tolerating public systems that create misery? It sometimes feels as if we are volunteer firefighters while no one asks who keeps lighting the fires.
True love does more than offer relief. It asks why the wound keeps reopening. That question is uncomfortable. It should be.
Repentance Is Stranger Than We Think
I used to think repentance meant feeling bad about myself. Lent as a season of guilt.
But repentance is turning. Repair. Moving toward right relationship instead of drifting away.
That includes personal failures—pettiness, dishonesty, indifference. But it also includes the systems we benefit from, the injustices we have learned not to see.
A friend once said Lent should make you uncomfortable with your comfort. That feels accurate, though I am not always sure what to do with it.
Climate catastrophe, racial injustice, casteism, regional divisions, polarization—these are not just policy issues. They are failures of love. They reveal what we have chosen to protect and whom we have been willing to sacrifice.
Lent does not hand out solutions. It sharpens the questions. It dares you to imagine repentance not as guilt but as courage—the courage to change direction even when you do not know exactly where you are headed.
Love Isn’t Safe, But It’s Honest
At the center of Lent stands the cross, which I still find unsettling. Christianity insists that love is vulnerable. That it risks misunderstanding, rejection, and loss.
This contradicts everything we are taught. Protect yourself. Curate your image. Stay safe.
Lent says love is not safe. But it is real.
This does not mean accepting abuse or glorifying suffering. It means recognizing that genuine love cannot remain untouched. To care deeply is to risk pain.
Lent trains us to stay present when love gets difficult—when forgiveness feels costly, when staying feels harder than leaving. We live in a culture skilled at walking away. Love requires staying power.
Hope, Slowly
Lent does not end with ashes. It moves toward Easter. Toward hope.
But the hope grows slowly. In a world obsessed with instant transformation, Lent teaches trust in the gradual. Small practices. Quiet faithfulness. Daily turning.
Love shaped by Lent is not naïve. It knows failure. It has stumbled. But it trusts that grace keeps showing up—not because we deserve it, but because that is what grace does.
It believes change is possible—not because we are strong enough, but because love is stubborn.
Lent forms people capable of beginning again. Of listening when it is hard. Of staying when leaving would be easier.
Some days that does not feel like enough. But perhaps what we need is not the dramatic gesture. Perhaps it is the slow turning toward what is real. Toward each other. Toward love that costs something and therefore means something.
Learning to love slowly may not look impressive. But it might, quietly, be the only way love lasts.
