He'd failed at Lent. The poor man, despondent in the middle of his first Lent, found he couldn't keep the disciplines. He felt farther from God than when he'd started, and wondered at how much faith he actually had, if any. It was a sad note. But not unusual. He was a new Catholic, who seems to have been over-doing it in that convert way. But some Catholics who grew up with Lent really hate it. They hear it as telling them they're crap. I'd grown up in the sunny liberalism of a lefty college town. When in my early twenties, I discovered Christianity with a church year, Ash Wednesday and Lent felt to me like a bracing note of realism. It was the dark that made the light brighter, the descent into the pit that made the ascent to the peak all the better. Most Episcopalians felt the same. When we entered the Church, I discovered a lot of Catholics didn't. They'd grown up in American Jansenism, or in a puritanized form of Catholicism, or among Catholics who thought tearing you down completely would make you love God more. Some grew up under abusers, who will twist a truth to give them another way to hurt and control their victims. Lent gave their abusers the perfect tool for breaking them down.