Lent Is Not a Resolution

Every year, Lent risks being misunderstood in the same way.

It is treated like a religious version of New Year’s resolutions: a season of goals, habits, and personal improvement. We ask familiar questions. What should I give up? What should I fix? What will I do better this time? Lent becomes a spiritual reset button, a chance to try again at becoming the person we wish we already were.

But Lent is not a fresh start.
It is a confrontation.

New Year’s resolutions are built on optimism. Lent is built on truth. January assumes that with enough effort, discipline, and motivation, we can improve ourselves. Ash Wednesday begins with a far less flattering diagnosis: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

That is not motivational language. It is theological realism.

Resolutions aim at self-mastery. Lent aims at surrender. One asks how we can optimize ourselves; the other exposes how little control we actually have. This is why the Church begins Lent not with encouragement, but with ashes. Before any discipline is proposed, our illusions are dismantled.

The prophet Joel captures this posture perfectly: “Return to me with all your heart… rend your hearts, not your garments” (Joel 2:12–13). Lent is not about changing appearances or habits alone; it is about the painful work of interior conversion. And interior conversion does not feel like progress.

If Lent were a New Year’s resolution, it would reward consistency. Instead, it reveals weakness.

Consider fasting. When reduced to a resolution, fasting becomes a personal challenge—proof of discipline, control, or willpower. But when received as the Church intends, fasting does not make us feel strong; it makes us honest. Hunger reveals irritability, impatience, resentment, and distraction. The fast “fails,” and in that failure we learn something true about ourselves.

St. Paul knew this interior struggle well. “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:19). Lent does not contradict this experience; it confirms it. It does not flatter our intentions. It exposes our inability to save ourselves through effort alone.

Prayer in Lent follows the same pattern. Many expect Lent to deepen prayer by making it more intense or emotionally rich. Instead, prayer often becomes dry, distracted, and unrewarding. This is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that God is withdrawing sensible consolation so that prayer can be purified.

Christ warns us about this temptation directly: “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites… go into your room and shut the door” (Matthew 6:5–6). Prayer in Lent is hidden, unrewarded, and often unsatisfying—precisely because it is being stripped of self-gratification.

St. John of the Cross famously wrote that to reach union with God, one must pass through darkness. Lent is that darkness. It removes the emotional props that allow us to believe we are spiritually competent. As Fulton Sheen warned, “We must learn to live without our emotional props.” New Year’s resolutions stack those props higher. Lent removes them.

Almsgiving, too, resists the logic of improvement. It is not about generosity as self-expression or feeling charitable. True almsgiving wounds our sense of ownership. It forces us to give without recognition, gratitude, or emotional payoff. Christ again is explicit: “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3). The moment almsgiving makes us feel virtuous, it has already lost its power.

This is why Lent cannot be quantified. There are no metrics for repentance. No visible progress bars. No spiritual “before and after.” Lent unfolds in the hidden places Christ names—the places where no one is watching and where success feels indistinguishable from failure.

New Year’s resolutions ask, What can I change?
Lent asks, What must die?

That question is not energizing. It is sobering. Lent does not promise improvement; it promises exposure. And exposure feels like loss before it feels like freedom.

This is why so many abandon Lent halfway through. It does not cooperate with our desire for control. It resists our need to feel successful. Lent hands us back to God not as projects, but as beggars.

St. Paul captures this paradox when he hears Christ say, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Lent does not eliminate weakness; it brings us face to face with it. And only there does grace finally have room to act.

If Lent were about improvement, it would end in pride or disappointment. Either we would congratulate ourselves for our discipline, or quietly give up when we fail. But Lent is ordered toward neither. It is ordered toward mercy.

This is why the Church keeps Lent tethered to the Cross. Christ does not improve Himself; He empties Himself. “He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death—even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). The Christian pattern is not self-enhancement, but self-emptying.

Self-improvement leaves the self intact.
Conversion does not.

Lent is not a season for becoming better versions of ourselves. It is a season for becoming honest about who we are without God. And that honesty is the beginning—not the obstacle—of grace.

New Year’s resolutions end quietly, usually forgotten.
Lent ends at the empty tomb.

Not because we succeeded, but because Christ did.

Lent is not about becoming better.
It is about becoming truthful.

And truth, however uncomfortable, is where resurrection begins.