This year, with an early beginning to the season of Lent, we may need an especial reminder that the word “Lent” comes from the Old English word for “spring.” With snow only beginning to melt and many more days of cold weather ahead of us, I’m sure, 2026 might be a worthy year to reflect on Lent as a time when spring awakens among and within us. Lent may very well be about penitence, fasting, abstinence, spiritual practices, and self-discipline, but all those things are a means to an end. The end is spiritual spring cleaning.
What coldness within our hearts needs to melt this Lent by the warm fire of the Holy Spirit? What hardness of heart needs softening through prayer and self-discipline this Lent? When viewed in this way, spiritual practices, prayer, and pious acts are not intended to burden us with discomfort. They are necessary for turning our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh.
I have become convinced that most people don’t need reminding of their sinfulness and of the ways in which they fail to live into the likeness of God. Even despite this, some people are unwilling to own up to their sins or believe they need to change, and this may very well be because they don’t really believe that God forgives. Or maybe God forgives with a whole host of strings attached. Many people simply don’t know how to deal with their sinfulness. The danger is always that we throw up our sinfulness in a kind of general way in the confession at Masses and move on without really engaging in thorough and prayerful self-examination. In other words, we too often neglect the very medicine our soul needs to find healing.
Each year during Lent, I write about the beauty of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. This sacrament is a gift of our prayer book and of the Church, which enables us to move toward a proper, honest acknowledgment of the ways in which we have fallen short of God’s desire for our lives. The outcome of a good confession is a release from all the sin that burdens our hearts. Yes, God forgives before we even ask, but if we don’t ask for forgiveness, then we will never fully recognize that God does forgive. If we do not amend our ways and turn to the Lord again and again, we will be stunted in our spiritual growth. Sometimes the tangible assurance of God’s forgiveness in the absolution is precisely what we need for our spiritual healing. Confession to a priest is not a vaccine or spiritual pill, nor is it an end in and of itself. It is a means to an end, and that end is restoration to wholeness with God and one another.
In my own practice of confession, I have had wise counsel from priests who have helped me to find patterns in my own tendency to sin. Making one’s confession (and hearing confessions as a priest) is humbling. The more one is honest about one’s own sins and refuses to excuse one’s own spiritual blind spots, the less likely one is to judge others, and the more one is able to see with full clarity that God is perfect love.
We inhabit both an unforgiving world and an unforgiving Church. Anyone who is in prison and released will probably tell you that they are never truly free again, and this reality wounds the heart of God. There are some in the Church who have been held accountable for their actions and who, likewise, never feel free again—even in the Church. And this wounds the heart of God, too. By practicing confession and keeping ourselves honest before God and one another, we practice what we preach, which is forgiveness. The Church should be the most forgiving place in the world, and is there any better news than that the God we worship and adore is One who never stops forgiving, who makes everything new, and who is perfectly boundless in mercy?
I invite you to observe a holy Lent and encourage you to mark this season of renewal by attending Mass on Ash Wednesday, February 18. The ashes that will be placed on your foreheads—in the same shape and place that many of you were anointed with oil in baptism—are a sign that we are marked as Christ’s own forever, not as condemned sinners but as redeemed, beloved children of God, held in the embrace of his mercy and forgiveness. Let those ashes on your foreheads—for all the world to see—be a testament to the good news of Christ, that he has lived among us to heal us, to make us whole, to set us free, and to reconcile us to God and one another.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle