I have been donating blood since 2011. Every season, without fail. It started small, a free afternoon, a drive across town, the quiet sense that I should do something with my body besides take care of it. But somewhere along the way, especially after my ordination as a deacon, it became something I could not imagine Lent without.
I am not sure I can fully explain why. It is not dramatic. There is nothing particularly holy about lying on a cot for twenty minutes while someone draws blood from your arm. You do not walk out feeling transformed. You feel a little lightheaded, you drink some juice, and you drive home. But something about it keeps me honest. It is one of the few things I do during this season that actually costs me something I can feel.
That is what I keep coming back to each year as Lent begins.
We are good at the motions. Give something up. Add a prayer. Show up to Mass a little more faithfully. I have done all of it, and I do not mean to dismiss any of it; the practices matter. But I have also moved through plenty of Lenten seasons that left me essentially unchanged. Six weeks of mild adjustment, and then Easter, and then life continues exactly as it was.
I think the season is asking for something harder than that.
What I have come to believe, slowly and not without resistance, is that Lent is really about direction. Not just what we are willing to give up, but what we are willing to give. There is a difference. Giving something up can stay private, contained, and more or less comfortable. Giving something, time, money, presence, blood requires us to move toward someone else. It pulls us out of ourselves.
That outward pull is the whole point.
When I donate blood, I do not know who receives it. I never will. That anonymity used to feel unsatisfying, like the act was disappearing into a void. Now I think that is part of what makes it formative. It is not about the feeling of having helped. It is about giving without needing anything back, not even the knowledge that it mattered.
That is harder than it sounds in a world that tracks everything, measures impact, and encourages us to curate our generosity for maximum meaning.
I will be honest about something. There have been Lenten seasons where I kept the blood donation and quietly let everything else slide. Skipped the fasting. Halfhearted with prayer. I told myself the donation was enough, that at least I was doing something concrete while the rest of my devotion went thin. It was a way of staying technically faithful while avoiding the fuller cost the season was asking for.
I do not think I am unusual in that. We find the one thing we can point to and let it carry more weight than it should. The discipline becomes a shield instead of a door.
What broke that pattern for me, at least partially, was recognising that the blood donation only stays honest when the rest of Lent is honest too. The fasting is not separate from the giving, it is what makes the giving mean something. When I am not willing to go hungry for a few hours, my generosity starts to feel like it is coming from surplus rather than sacrifice. And surplus giving, I have noticed, does not change me much. It just makes me feel better about staying comfortable.
So each year I come back to a simple question: What am I actually offering this season? Not just subtracting, but giving. What concrete, recurring thing am I willing to make part of my devotion, something that takes real time, real effort, something I would notice the absence of?
For me, it is blood. Quiet, ordinary, and mine to give. Yours will be something different. But I think it needs to be something. Something physical enough to remind you that faith was never meant to stay inside your head. Something that, when Holy Week arrives, you can look back on honestly and say, 'That cost me something real”
That is the conversion I hope Lent will work in me. Not a better set of habits, but a genuine loosening of my grip, on comfort, on time, on the polite, self-protecting version of faith that asks very little and offers less.
Lent keeps asking me to open my hand. The question is whether I am willing to.
