Here is how not to think about Lent.
We, as we occasionally bring ourselves to acknowledge, do wrong things. These offend God, and we need to placate God. So we pray more, give things up, and generally behave in a more religious fashion in the hope that God will forgive us.
Stated boldly like that, hopefully no Christian would sign up to this view of Lent. Yet, such is the temptation to make God in our own image, and such is our own moralism, that we often behave as though the above account were true. So it’s important to remind ourselves of the truth.
This is quite simply that God is in love with us, cannot help being in love with us, and is in love with us no matter what we do. So over-the-top is his love that his response to us turning away from him, as we all do, is to act in the very depth of our being to draw us back into fellowship with him. Even our turning back to God is God’s gift (notice that we are given ashes, sometimes with the words ‘turn away from sin’). We do not need to earn this love, which is just as well, since there is nothing we could possibly do to earn it.
The difficulty, from our side, is accepting this love, which is often tied up with accepting that we are loveable (as we are: made in the image and likeness of God, sharing our humanity with Christ). This, I think is the task of Lent: to work with God’s grace to bring ourselves to accept that we are loved, prising our fearful hands away from the substitutes for love which we all build in our lives, placing ourselves in prayer in the presence of the God who loves us, and who calls us to life from the ashes.
In a strange land 