Every year, something shifts in February or March. Catholics who have been coasting through ordinary time suddenly rediscover their rosaries. Meat disappears from Friday dinner tables. People speak more quietly about what they are giving up, wearing their sacrifice with a kind of dignified restraint. There is something genuinely beautiful about this collective turning. But it is also worth examining why it takes a liturgical season to make us live like Christians. The three pillars of Lent — prayer, fasting, and almsgiving — are not Lenten inventions. Notice how Jesus frames them in Matthew 6. He does not say if you pray, if you fast, if you give. He says when . These were assumed rhythms of a life oriented toward God, not emergency measures deployed for 40 days before being packed away with the purple vestments. Lent does not introduce us to a better way of living. It simply removes our excuses for avoiding it. In that sense, it is less a destination than a training ground, a struc...