February 11, 2026

By Father William Muench
NCC columnist

Time for Lent. This is the time for you and me to prepare for our annual retreat – time for Lenten prayer and mortification. I want to take a moment here to remind you that the principal reason for Lent is love. Jesus challenges us to love God above all things, with our whole heart and our whole soul and to love our neighbor as ourselves. So, we need Lent. We need a time to put new life into our relationship with our God – to be ready to live a more powerful love for our God. Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk wrote often of the primacy of love over kindness, asceticism, contemplation, solitude, prayer. God has demonstrated his love for us. Lent is our time to strengthen and enliven our love for our God.

Lent is a time of renewal, a time to make our love for our God to come alive. We have a prayer at Mass that prays that our love for God will shine forth, that our dedication to our God will influence how we live each day. Lent separates us from worldly things and opens our hearts in love for our God.

Recently, the Sunday Gospel reading reminded us of the Lord’s Beatitudes. These Beatitudes show us the path to love and happiness. These Beatitudes are the goals to a happy and holy life as a follower of Jesus. They show us the way to change ourselves so that we learn to love like Jesus. We learn to be a loving person, constantly ready to bring happiness and love to our world and ready to bring Jesus to our world. Lent gives us weeks of retreat to make us truly the loving People of God, living in the Lord’s holiness and happiness of the Beatitudes.

Lent helps us remember the way to be poor in Spirit, to be gentle and meek followers of Jesus, to be merciful and forgiving like Jesus, to hunger and thirst for what is right, to be peacemakers.

Let me take a moment here to consider becoming a peacemaker. This demands greater dedication than just being a peaceful person. This demands that we want to demonstrate that we know we have to make our world better and more peaceful. That is not an easy dedication. It is simply attention to the little things. It may demand that we are ready to change what must be changed, that we are ready to walk with Jesus, that we are ready to do Lent, ready to live out our discipleship.

Let me show you what I mean: Here are some qualities of a true peacemaker. Again, it is the little things. It begins with letting go of resentments and being ready to allow Jesus to calm what is angry inside me. So many little things, like refusing gossip, reaching our first after a disagreement, listening before judging, choosing words that heal, rather than wound.

So, you see, Lent is needed. Lent becomes a time to learn again all that Jesus expects of his disciples – like you and me. That is why the Beatitudes are so great in showing us the way, guiding us, helping us to discover that we can make this world of ours a better place and that I can truly be a missionary right here where I am. It is all about the little things. Lent makes saints.