Lent 2020 is not a sentimental season but a summons into the very heart of the Paschal Mystery, where God’s love shows itself as concrete, demanding, and astonishingly tender. To “keep your gaze fixed on the outstretched arms of Christ crucified” is to let yourself be rescued again and again, to admit that your life is not self-made property but a gift born from the Father’s desire to give you life in abundance. In that gaze, confession stops being a courtroom and becomes an embrace, where guilt is not excused but washed away.

This path is walked face-to-face, in prayer that is less performance than surrender. True prayer breaks our inner resistance, softens our hardness, and opens a hidden space where absurdity gives way to meaning. There, in the wounded and the suffering, we touch Christ’s living flesh and quietly discover the scandalous joy of being loved while still unworthy.