Lent: Healing Begins Here

The first days of Lent offer a kind of holy shock. The readings do not linger on vague ideals but bring us straight to the physician’s office, where our sickness is named and our healing begins. Isaiah unmasks fasting without justice. The psalm teaches the posture of the poor. Ezekiel reveals God’s heart; He takes no pleasure in anyone’s ruin. And in Luke, Jesus walks right up to a tax booth and calls a compromised man by name. The spiritual life, it seems, begins wherever we actually are.

The Physician Who Enters the Waiting Room

“Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do.” Jesus does not shout from a distance; he sits down at Levi’s table. This is not indulgence; it is the intimacy that makes change possible. The Gospel risks scandal to offer salvation. The medicine is proximity.

Many live with quiet ailments of the soul: the fatigue of divided lives, the low-grade fever of bitterness, the slow anemia of self-justification. Lent is not a season to perfect appearances; it is a season to bring our symptoms into the light. Christ’s clinic is open where honesty is dared; at the table, in the confessional, in the conversation we have avoided, in the silence where we finally stop explaining ourselves to ourselves.

Leaving the Booth

Levi “got up” and followed. The movement suggests more than relocation; it signals resurrection. What is our booth; our guarded place of control, calculation, or cynicism? For some, it is an algorithm of distraction. For others, a private resentment that pays out small, toxic dividends. The grace of the Gospel is that the call precedes our worthiness. The saint begins not with spotless record but with yielded step.

A helpful Lenten question is not “How will I fix everything?” but “Where is Jesus saying, ‘Follow me,’ and what is one concrete way to get up today?”

Mercy as Table Fellowship

Levi hosts a feast. Mercy becomes a meal before it becomes a treatise. Jesus eats with those who are complicated and complicit, the very people polite religion prefers to keep at arm’s length. In a world of curated identities and quick cancellations, table fellowship enacts a different politics: the communion of the unqualified. This is not moral shrugging; it is the place where sinners meet the medicine of truth without humiliation.

Consider what hospitality looks like now: an unhurried dinner where listening outpaces lecturing; a coffee with someone whose reputation would cost you social capital; a Sunday table where the lonely find a place card with their name.

Isaiah’s Fast: Repairers of the Breach

Isaiah weds prayer to justice. False accusation and malicious speech fracture communities; feeding the hungry and satisfying the afflicted rebuild them. The prophet dares to say that our light rises with our mercy, that our strength renews when the poor are not theory but neighbor.

Modern breaches are everywhere: in families that do not speak, in polarized workplaces, in digital feeds that reward contempt. Repair begins close to home:

• Cleanse speech of slander, insinuation, and the thrill of the takedown.
• Refuse the lazy comfort of caricature; ask the second question that dignifies.
• Share actual bread and actual time; generosity that does not touch the calendar or the wallet rarely reaches the heart.

Isaiah promises that those who live this way become like watered gardens. The miracle is not only what we do for others; it is what obedience does within us.

The Sabbath as Delight in a Culture of Exhaustion

The prophet also speaks of the Sabbath; not as dour rule but as delighted reverence. If our weeks run on the logic of productivity, the Sabbath is holy protest. It interrupts self-invention and returns identity to gift. We do not rest because we have finished; we rest because God is God and we are not.

Sabbath practice can be surprisingly concrete:

• Pray with the Sunday readings before Mass, slowly, with pen in hand.
• Put the phone in a drawer for long stretches; let attention become presence.
• Share a meal, linger, and honor conversation as sacrament of attention.
• Do a work of mercy that cannot be monetized.

Delight is not frivolous. It is how the soul remembers the order of love.

“Teach Me Your Way”: A Lent-Sized Prayer

Psalm 86 puts words into the mouth of anyone who is poor enough to ask: “Teach me your way, that I may walk in your truth.” This can become a breath prayer through the day; on the commute, between meetings, in the restless hour of the night. The psalmist does not ask for a map but a way; not for control but companionship. God answers such prayers with guidance that often feels like the next faithful step, not the whole staircase.

God’s Preference for Conversion

Ezekiel voices God’s desire clearly: He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked but rejoices in conversion. This is the antidote to both despair and presumption. To despairing hearts: your failure is not your fate. To presumptuous hearts: proximity to religion is not the same as likeness to Christ. Conversion is not an event we remember but a pattern we practice.

A practical word for Lent: go to confession. Bring the real story, not the résumé. Name the booth, hand over the ledgers, and hear the Physician say, “I absolve you.” His authority is not a theory; it is effective medicine.

A Word from Saint Peter Damian (Optional Memorial)

The Church also remembers Saint Peter Damian (1007–1072), monk and reformer, later cardinal-bishop of Ostia, declared a Doctor of the Church in the nineteenth century. Orphaned and mistreated in youth, he came to know God as Father and spent his life seeking the Church’s purification; not through rage but through penance, learning, and courage. A hermit who loved silence and a pastor who carried heavy responsibilities, he joined contemplation to action. His witness reminds today’s disciples that renewal begins on our knees and flows into our structures; without the first, the second curdles into ideology.

Peter Damian’s austerity was not a disdain for the world but a longing for its healing. His life poses a Lenten challenge: let interior reform be as serious as our critique of others, and let love be the signature of all correction.

Practicing the Word This Weekend

• Make a Levi move: identify one concrete “booth” and take a small, costly step away from it today.
• Set a table: invite someone who rarely receives invitations; listen more than you speak.
• Repair a breach: apologize without conditions; refrain from one form of malicious speech for a week.
• Keep Sabbath as delight: choose practices that return you to gratitude, worship, and unhurried presence.
• Pray Psalm 86 daily: “Teach me your way, O Lord,” especially when decisions pile up.

Christ walks the corridors of our ordinary lives like a physician doing rounds, stopping at each door with a simple command that is also a promise: “Follow me.” Light rises for those who rise to him. And the feast begins where sinners admit they are hungry.