April 19, 2025 // Diocese

We Are an Easter People, and Lent Has Prepared Us

Alex Giltner

Lent has finally ended. Can I get an amen?

Forty days. Forty days of filets of fish and shrimp curry (when we’re feeling really penitential). Forty days with only six (six!) interruptions of our incessant fasting. Forty days without sweets, or Facebook, or streaming TV shows, or whatever “poison” you picked to give up. Now it’s time to party. It’s Easter, by goodness! Now we can binge on all those things we denied ourselves for 40 days. Oh, how we have missed it – having those flame-wars in social media threads, losing sleep for just one more episode, making room (with a good bit of effort) for one more cookie, etc.

Of course, I write this with tongue firmly placed in cheek. Many of us have made great effort to deny ourselves of the right and just things that we normally and legitimately enjoy. While I do think we could sometimes try a little harder to make Lent a real penitential season, I do not think most of us blow Lent off. We have attempted to do something that is very much against our training – namely, to deny ourselves good things in preparation for something better: a greater capacity for the love of God.

That being said, at times, I do think we approach Lent as an ordeal or obstacle to endure so that we can get to the gooey center of Easter. Too often, people treat Lent as something to make it through. We augmented our life for a season, and now it is high time to get back to our old ways. Having fought the good fight, we emerge from Lent into Easter by celebration of … well … living like we used to live. By doing this, we miss the truly golden opportunity the Church offers us in the season of Lent: the chance to become something greater than we were.

Now, let me take this moment to firmly disavow approaching Lent as a kind of Catholic New Year’s resolution. I certainly do not want to reduce this sacred time of penance as a way to lose a few pounds or get better sleep. Nevertheless, I do think Lent is a time of cleansing and renewal – a time to build better habits of self-control, of prayer and virtue, and of living life for God and for others. Lent should not be an interruption to our normally scheduled programming; it should be a time of recommitment to the life to which we are called by the Gospel. We should not emerge from Lent sweaty but unchanged. Lent should change us in such a way that life after Lent, each year, is different from what it was before.

Indeed, I have come to think of Lent in some sense as a kind of training. But training for what? Self-denial and penance? Surely. But also, as a kind of training to, well, party. Not in the sense that the world does it. I can remember the first time I really dedicated myself to the time of Lent (as a Protestant, no less!). It was years ago, and I really went for it. I gave up all meat and all sweets for the entirety of Lent, not just on Fridays. At the time, this was a big sacrifice for me. I remember the first time I realized that this regimen, while very difficult, was having an unexpected but empowering effect. It was training me to look forward to Sundays.

This feeling has never left me, because I realized in that moment that, yes, I was looking forward to Sundays because I wanted to eat all the beef and cupcakes. But also, I realized that this was training me to see Sunday as a special day of celebration – a celebration of the Resurrection of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. It helped me to see Sundays, even outside of Lent, as a time to look forward to – as a weekly time set apart for celebration. And that was training me to look forward to the real party: heaven. What this time of penance was doing was stretching me out on the inside, making more room for the love of God that shall fill me when I may, by the grace of God, be united to Him in heaven.

Jesus tells us that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mk 2:27). One of the things Jesus is teaching us here is that Sabbath is not something we do for God because we owe Him something. We do indeed owe Him something – we actually owe Him everything and more, and there is no way an infinite number of Lents or Sabbaths could ever pay that bill. Nevertheless, the Sabbath is not something God demands from us for His sake; rather, it is a gift to us. And so is Lent. As it says in one of the Eucharistic prefaces, “Our praises add nothing to your greatness, but our thanksgiving is a gift from you.”

Lent is not just preparing us to celebrate the Easter liturgy; it is preparing us to become different. “Listen,” St. Paul writes, “I tell you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed” (1 Cor 15:51). Lent has prepared us for what the Tradition calls the “Eighth Day,” that eternal Easter when we shall be in heaven with Our Lord forever in the Final Resurrection. Lent is not just something to endure. In fact, if we let the grace of God do that good work in us, Lent will be part of what makes us ready and suitable for heaven.

Lent and Easter. The rhythm of life on this side of the blue. Lent has ended – for now – but it will return. And yet, a day is coming when Lent will be no more, and Easter will be forever. As we embrace the Eastertide, the time of celebration, may we do so remembering that “we do not grieve as the rest of mankind, as those with no hope” (1 Thes 4:13).

Can I get an amen?

Alex Giltner is the director of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend’s Office of Catechesis.