John Singarayar, SVD
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, the southern part of India, and riding the local train to college.
I had gone to the early service and forgot about the smudge until I caught my reflection in the subway window. A guy across from me was staring. Not hostile, just… aware. I almost wiped it off. But I did not, and 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. My friend calls them “the big three”, like they are pharmaceutical companies. But they are actually just different forms of attention.
Prayer—turning toward God instead of your own spiralling thoughts. Fasting—noticing where you are hooked, what you grab for when you are anxious or bored or lonely or just waiting for the microwave. Almsgiving—looking outward at all, which is harder than it sounds.
It [Lent] says love cannot grow where attention is constantly divided, and honestly, most of us are living with attention so fragmented we barely register as present anymore
I did not understand fasting until I gave up my phone for the first hour of each morning a few years ago. Not the whole day—I am not a monk. Just the first hour.
The first week I failed constantly. I would wake up, and my hand would reach for it before I was even conscious. Checking for what? Nothing had happened while I was asleep. No emergencies. No messages that could not wait 60 minutes. But I had already grabbed it, already started scrolling through yesterday’s arguments on Twitter, and already let my attention scatter into a dozen irrelevant directions before I had even made coffee.
When I finally managed to leave it in the other room, I did not know what to do with myself. I just stood in my kitchen, weirdly aware of my hands. The silence felt aggressive. I caught myself going to check it multiple times—muscle memory, like reaching for a phantom limb.
That is when I realised how little I had been paying attention to anything. Including myself. Especially me.
Here is what nobody tells you: fasting does not suppress desire. It exposes it
We live in an economy of managed distraction. Algorithms know exactly what will keep us clicking—outrage works, sentimentality works, and anything that shortcuts thinking works. Even our compassion gets performed now. We share the article, sign the petition, feel briefly better, and move on. Nothing actually changes, but we have done our part.
Lent cuts through that. It says love cannot grow where attention is constantly divided, and honestly, most of us are living with attention so fragmented we barely register as present anymore.
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 you have been using it for. Not just the thing itself—coffee or Instagram or sugar or whatever—but the work it was doing. The boredom it was covering. The anxiety it was managing. The questions it was helping you avoid.
I gave up coffee one Lent in my 20s because I thought I was too dependent on it [I was]. The headaches were bad, but worse was the mid-afternoon collapse when I would normally grab my third cup and push through. Without it, I just… crashed. Had to actually feel tired. Had to acknowledge I had been overriding my body’s signals for years.
Lent does not shame that. It just makes you look at it. What are you really hungry for?
Give something up and you discover what you have been using it for. Not just the thing itself—coffee or Instagram or sugar or whatever—but the work it was doing. The boredom it was covering. The anxiety it was managing. The questions it was helping you avoid
We treat love like indulgence now—more is better, boundaries are restrictive, and saying no is mean. But Lent suggests something I am still trying to wrap my head around: that discipline might actually be care. That restraint might be affection.
My nephew is four. When he wants candy for breakfast, and my sister says no, she has not been cruel. She is saying, “I want something better for you than what you are reaching for right now.” Even though he cannot see it yet. Even though, from his perspective, she is just the obstacle between him and what he wants.
I think Lent does that to us. Not in a patronising way—we are not children. But in a way that asks: what if the thing you think you need is not actually what you are hungry for?
Love costs, but we’ve made it cheap
Almsgiving sits at the heart of Lent, and I think it is the hardest part. Maybe because it is so easy to do badly.
Real love costs something. Charity that never inconveniences you is not charity—it is an abstraction. It is signing up for the monthly donation; you will never notice it leaving your account. Which is fine, useful even, but it is not the kind of giving that changes you.
Lent suggests something I am still trying to wrap my head around: that discipline might actually be care. That restraint might be affection
Lent pushes past that. It asks for the giving that you feel. That requires rearranging your budget or your schedule or your plans. Not in a performative hair-shirt way, but in a way that acknowledges: this matters enough to cost me something.
But—and this is where it gets complicated—Lent also will not let you feel too good about it. Because giving is not about moral superiority. It is about solidarity. About acknowledging that we are all fragile, all responsible for each other in ways we have spent a lot of energy pretending we are not.
And then Lent asks the harder question: why does this suffering exist in the first place? Why are we encouraged to be privately generous while tolerating public systems that create misery? Like we are all supposed to be volunteer firefighters while nobody questions who keeps setting the fires.
True love does not just offer relief. It asks why the wound keeps reopening. That is uncomfortable. It should be.
Repentance is weirder than we think
I used to think repentance meant feeling bad about yourself. Lent as a season of guilt.
But that is not quite it. Repentance is turning around. Repair. Moving toward a right relationship instead of away from it.
That includes personal stuff—the ways I have been petty or dishonest or careless with people. But it also includes the larger patterns we are caught in. The systems we benefit from. The injustices we have learnt not to see.
True love does not just offer relief. It asks why the wound keeps reopening. That is uncomfortable. It should be
A friend of mine says Lent should make you uncomfortable with your comfort. I think that is right, though I still do not know what to do with it most of the time.
Climate catastrophe, racial injustice, casteism, regionalism, the polarisation that is tearing everything apart—these are not just policy problems. They are failures of love. They reveal what we have chosen to value and what we have been willing to sacrifice. Usually other people. Usually people far enough away that we do not have to look at them.
Lent will not hand you solutions. But it sharpens the questions. It dares you to imagine repentance not as guilt but as 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 centre of Lent stands the cross, which I still find deeply strange. Christianity insists that love is vulnerable. That it risks rejection, misunderstanding, and loss. That God himself, somehow, chose that.
It cuts against every instinct we are taught. Protect yourself. Curate your image. Do not give people ammunition.
Lent says: love is not safe. But it is real.
Lent says: love is not safe. But it is real
This does not mean accepting abuse or glorifying suffering—I need to be clear about that. It means accepting that genuine love cannot remain untouched. That caring deeply means accepting the possibility of pain. And that is terrifying, honestly.
Lent trains us to stay present when love gets hard. When it would be easier to withdraw or numb out or find someone easier to care about. We live in a culture that is very good at walking away. Love requires staying power.
Hope, slowly
Lent does not end with ashes. It moves toward Easter, toward resurrection, toward hope.
But the hope is patient. It grows slowly, through small practices that often feel pointless. In a world obsessed with going viral, with instant transformation, with the before-and-after photo, Lent teaches trust in the gradual.
Lent forms people capable of beginning again. Of listening when it is hard. Of staying when leaving would be easier
Love shaped by Lent is not naïve. It knows failure intimately—has sat with it, even. But it also knows that grace keeps showing up. Not because we have earned it. Just because that is what grace does.
It believes change is possible. Not because we are good enough, but because love turns out to be more stubborn than we are.
Lent forms people capable of beginning again. Of listening when it is hard. Of staying when leaving would be easier.
I do not know if that is enough. Some days it does not feel like enough. But maybe it is the thing we actually need—not the dramatic gesture, but the slow turning toward what is real. Toward each other. Toward love that costs something and means something and might, against all odds, hold.
