It’s hard for Catholics to ignore the summons to conversion we hear on Ash Wednesday. 

As the priest smudges our foreheads with ashes in the shape of the cross with the words, “Remember you are dust and unto dust you shall return,” he similarly brings us back to the words with which Jesus began his public ministry: 

“Repent and believe in the Gospel.” 

Lent is a season in which we are helped to remember that just as Jesus died, so will we, and that therefore we should die to sin and live by faith in the Gospel. 

It’s a period of hope announcing God’s mercy and the opportunity for a second — or 70 times seventh — chance. 

It’s the “acceptable time” and “day of salvation” to be “reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20-6:2) and to “return to [God] with your whole heart” (Joel 2:12). 

There are several ways we are tempted to live Lent halfheartedly rather than wholeheartedly. 

One is to skip Lent and its call to a new life altogether. Another is to live it superficially, receiving ashes merely out of a good habit but with the intention soon to wipe them off and get back to life as “normal,” as if Ash Wednesday never happened. A third is to live Lenten superficially, choosing as a penance the moral equivalent of curling exercises with a half-pound barbell, giving up potato chips but looking forward to lobster, jumbo shrimp and crab cakes on Fridays. 

Perhaps the most common inadequate response is to live Lent in a self-centered way, using it as a spiritually motivated self-help season: to grow in self-mastery through exercise, shed some pounds by eating healthier and less, detoxify from bad habits and social media, and begin to feel better about ourselves by making at least some time for God and some sacrifices for others. Rather than returning to God with our whole heart, we can turn inward. Instead of doing things with purity of intention for God the Father “who sees in secret,” we can do them in front of the mirror or to attract others’ attention. 

To live Lent well begins with a desire to go with Jesus into the desert and return profoundly changed. It means to follow Jesus along the way of the cross, dying to ourselves and embracing the “new life” he gives (Romans 6:4). To “believe in the Gospel” means not just assenting to its truth claims but making it our plan of life. 

Lent is the season, therefore, in which we not only go back to the basics but, together with those preparing for baptism, respond to God’s grace to renew our own baptismal promises and live out their full significance. 

That means that Lent is the time in which we seek to become radically Christian, returning to the “love we had at first” (Revelation 2:4) or to the love that should always mark our relationship with God and others. 

It’s a season to commit or recommit ourselves to holiness and mission, to discipleship and apostolate, to responding fully to Jesus’ call to be with him so that he might send us forth to preach (Mark 3:14). 

That’s why I think it’s helpful for us to apply Jesus’ trifold instructions on Ash Wednesday — “When you pray,” “When you fast,” “When you give alms” — not narrowly according to our own whims or fears but within the full context of everything else he teaches in the Gospel. 

Jesus desires the same total conversion in us that he wanted in his first disciples and apostles. Therefore, our prayer, fasting and charity are meant to be integrated within the mission for which he has called, formed and commissioned us. 

Lent ultimately has this purpose to form and restore us to Christian mission, to help us become fully evangelized so that we might then, as Jesus’ Body, evangelize the world. 

So it’s important for us to understand Jesus’ annual Lenten summons in this urgent missionary key. 

As we seek to respond to Jesus’ words, “When you pray,” it’s crucial for us to join him in praying to the Harvest Master for laborers in his harvest. We remember that when he first asked the disciples to pray for this intention, he then summoned his first apostles from those who were praying (Matthew 9:37-10:1). He wants us praying, therefore, not only for God the Father, the Harvest Master, to call “others” but for the grace that we, too, respond to his calling us to mission. 

Prayer is not just about our intimate friendship with God by which we enter more deeply into his life; it is similarly about seeking that his will be done and imploring the grace to be faithful in accomplishing it. His will for the salvation of all — and our and others’ role in it — are manifest. 

Likewise, Jesus tells us, “When you fast,” Lent is far more than a time to try to conquer our visceral cravings; rather, it’s the time to learn to hunger for what God hungers for, which is ultimately to feed every one of his sons and daughters on the Food of everlasting life. 

Jesus said that his disciples would fast when he, the Bridegroom, is taken away from us (Matthew 9:15). Fasting, therefore, is so that we might hunger in turn for him, to starve to be fully with him, and so that those who do not yet know him — the vast majority of the 8.1 billion alive today — might taste and see the feast he has prepared. 

Finally, Jesus tells us, “When you give alms,” he expects us to sacrifice, to share what he has given us with others, so that we might participate in his providential care and learn in deeds how to love others as he has loved us. This involves both the corporal and spiritual works of mercy as we seek to care for the needs of others’ bodies and souls. 

Economists remind us that the way we spend our money is an indication of what we value. Throughout the Gospel, Jesus reminds us that we cannot serve both God and mammon and helps us therefore to choose to place our money at the service of God and his kingdom: to make the choice the Rich Young Man was too afraid to make and act rather like the poor widow Jesus praises in the Gospel, the converted Zacchaeus, or the women who provided for Jesus and the apostles along their journeys (Matthew 6:24, 19:22; Mark 12:42; Luke 19:8, 8:3). 

Lent prepares us to squeeze through the eye of the needle by summoning us to invest earthly treasure to store up for ourselves treasure in heaven, through direct care of the poor and service of the Church’s mission (Matthew 19:24, 6:19).

As we begin the holy season of Lent, let us remember that the gift the Lord wants of us is to help us enter as Saul and emerge as Paul, to help us repent and believe in the Gospel as fully as we see in the life of Simon Peter, Mary Magdalene, Matthew and the others. The means is by living his call to pray, fast and sacrifice fully in communion with his own, by sharing his missionary motivation, his desire for the salvation of all.