Deepening our Christian lives requires us to develop what St Paul calls the mind of Christ, and we might think of the experience of each Lent as offering an opportunity to deepen formation and renew our catechesis.
Secular culture understands Lent only in terms of self-improvement, which in itself is an idolatrous focus on the ego whose seduction we need to resist.
How can we most effectively resist that initial temptation? By learning to see Lent as the divine drama of the first covenant, which offers us an interpretive story for our own pilgrimage deeper into the journey Christ calls us to travel.
