Whether you were raised in the Catholic faith as I was, or not, there is something we can all learn from these forty days leading up to Easter. Forty days — drawn from the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness— set apart for the work of the interior life.
Into what do these forty days invite us? What quality of attention does Lent actually call us toward? It is clear that something is required of us — some turning, some reckoning, some genuine meeting with ourselves before the Divine. What is less clear is the tone in which that meeting is to occur. Too often, Lenten practice slides toward self-punishment: an intensified version of the inner critic’s voice, now sanctified by religious language. We fast, we repent, we scrutinize our failures — and underneath the practice runs an unexamined assumption that severity is what is required of us.
The great Christian contemplative traditions suggest something more radical and more redemptive: that the deepest Lenten work is not the discipline of severity but the discipline of compassion — and that these two movements, purification, release and letting go alongside compassion, are not sequential steps in the spiritual life but a single, simultaneous act of the awakening soul.
The Hebrew word most often translated as “repentance” is “teshuvah” — a turning, a return. It is not primarily a feeling of guilt; it is a reorientation. What we are being invited into is the honest opening of our hearts, first to ourselves, then to others.
The Lenten call to repentance is not an invitation to despise ourselves — it is an invitation to see ourselves honestly, with the same clear and loving gaze that the tradition attributes to the Divine: one that perceives the suffering and confusion underneath our behavior and meets it not with condemnation but with the willingness to heal. Only what we bring honestly before the light of loving and compassionate awareness can genuinely be let go.
I was always taught, and perhaps you were too, that Lenten practices assume a sequence: first we purify ourselves, then we become worthy of grace; first we achieve some measure of inner cleanliness, then compassion becomes possible.
But spiritual wisdom traditions from the East and West teach that purification and compassion are not two stages. They are one movement. Compassionate awareness is the purifying agent. To hold oneself with genuine, non-judgmental love and compassion— to bring honest, tender, undefended attention to what has been hiding in us — is the very act by which the dross is separated from the gold. The quality of awareness we bring to our own patterns actively shapes what those patterns become. Harsh, condemning awareness hardens what it touches and drives it underground. Compassionate awareness, held steadily over time, begins to dissolve it.
The soul does not need to be forced into wholeness, into holiness: It needs to be loved into it.
I have found that this idea, taken into my meditations and daily life, reframes the whole of Lenten practice. I have found that these are practices for creating the interior conditions in which a genuine self-encounter becomes possible: the clearing of clutter, the quieting of distraction, the turn toward the neighbor that loosens the grip of self-preoccupation. They prepare the ground. But the ground itself, the ground from which healing and renewal actually grow, is not effort. It is awareness held in self-compassion and love.
Non-judgmental awareness, then, is not a modern psychological addition to an ancient tradition. It is a recovery of what the wisdom traditions have always known at their center: that the quality of attention we bring to ourselves in the presence of the Divine is the very thing that determines whether our Lenten practice opens us or closes us, frees us or binds us more tightly to what we hoped to leave behind.
This Lent, the invitation is not to be harder on yourself, but to be more honest with yourself — and to discover that honesty held in compassion is a far more powerful instrument of transformation than honesty weaponized against yourself. To bring whatever you have been carrying into the light of awareness. To meet it without flinching and without condemning. To ask, as the wisdom traditions ask, not “what is wrong with me?” but “what is trying to be healed here?”
These forty days lead to Easter — to resurrection, to newness, to the life that emerges from what has passed through death. But the resurrection is not separate from the Lenten journey. It is what that journey, undertaken with honesty and compassion, makes possible. The soul that has genuinely met itself in the wilderness, without armor and without condemnation, arrives at Easter already changed. Not because it has punished itself into worthiness, but because it has allowed itself to be loved into wholeness.
