An experience can have the epistemic power of disruption, allowing for a new way of seeing what has become familiar in our lives. This reflection offers some insights into an experience that has initiated a new way of seeing Lent, one that I invite you to explore with me. On the second Sunday of Lent, 2026, I had the pleasure of worshipping at Saint Brendan the Navigator Parish located in Cummings, Georgia. Walking into this beautiful church, one immediately notices its spaciousness. Everything looks new. Yet, what were most disruptive to the imagination were the following: that Sunday was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the parish. One of the auxiliary bishops of Atlanta, Most Reverend John Nhan Tran, along with two priests, including the pastor, and two deacons, served as the ministers at the liturgy. The ceremony had an honorary guard of the Knights of Columbus. The church was packed full.
What was most interesting to observe was the number of children playing, crying, and speaking a language that only infants and God can understand. Observing the different generations of humans gathered, one notices a sense of abundance defining the space and season. Yet it was the second Sunday of Lent. How can abundance be associated with Lent?
“Lent is never a reality that stands on its own; it points to a relationship of abundance with a God radically defined by saturated life.”
Too often, we are made to think that Lent is all about letting go. It is about a turn to aridity, penance, sacrifice, and frugality as a source of spiritual connection with God. On the first Sunday of Lent, we are even confronted with the gospel reading that locates Jesus in the desert, enduring his symbolic temptations at the hands of the devil after a forty-day fast. With these in mind, one can easily conclude that abundance and Lent are two contradictory realities.
But we forget to ask: what does Lent point to? Lent is never a reality that stands on its own. It points to a relationship of abundance with a God that is radically defined by saturated life.
Two major motifs that Lent evokes reflect abundance. First, the desert, when viewed superficially, evokes a sense of aridity. A closer look at it reveals a place of abundance that manifests as the resiliency of life. The desert is spacious. It welcomes all who seek to enter it without discrimination. Creatures who live in the desert are radically defined by existential resiliency. They endure even in the face of hardships. Their existence is a reminder to all that life is always rooted in abundance when resiliency is embraced as an existential virtue.
“The desert and the spring both reveal the same truth: life persists and flourishes even where scarcity seems to reign.”
Second, it is not accidental that the Church locates the season of Lent within the natural season of Spring. Spring exudes life in abundance. Plants awake from the slumber of Winter. Animals emerge from the caves of hibernation. When one looks around one’s environment during Lent, one notices the beauty of life in all its manifestations. It is during this period that the Church invites itself to journey into a deeper realm of spiritual consciousness and solidarity with all in God’s world. This sense of solidarity is not intended to steal away from the abundance that nature reveals. Rather, it is to lean into it and to show that the sacrifices we embrace during this season are intended to evoke the solidarity of abundance with the God of abundance, who reveals Godself through the abundance inherent in nature.
Returning to my experience at Saint Brendan the Navigator Parish at Cummings, Georgia, the tapestry of the community speaks to what God invites us to experience during Lent. We are invited to embrace a vision that is polyphonic, one that allows us to see not just that which we are familiar with. We are asked to see the unfamiliar; a vision that is intended to disrupt our imagination so that the saturated grace of life can be received and shared with all. The crying, playful, and sound-making children offered their own homiletic message along that offered by Bishop Tran as a reminder to us that all sermonic engagement with the Word of God ought to mediate a reminder of who God is – the God of saturated life. Children are a concrete expression of saturated life oriented toward many possibilities. Similarly, the Word of God mediates saturated life that orients its listeners to several pathways for manifesting that gift of God’s life in the world.
Abundance not only links us to a saturated life but also disrupts our imagination. It has the capacity to evoke in us a consciousness of beauty. Just like the desert that invites us to embrace its own beauty, which is instantiated through a different pathway, in this case, it is through the resilient existence of all that lives in the desert, the spring season is saturated with beauty. Nature invites us to encounter its content through the dazzling and varied colors of all the creatures it nurtures. These two motifs, intricately linked to Lent, are reminders to us to see Lent as a time of practicing a way of living that exudes abundance. In this case, it is the grace of saturated life.
“To receive the grace of saturated life during Lent is to awaken to solidarity with those whose lives are marked by violence, displacement, and suffering.”
Saturated life as a gift that reflects abundance, which God makes possible, has an ethical grounding as well. As Christians who take the reality of Lent seriously, our embrace of life ought to evoke in us as well the consciousness of solidarity with all who may not be experiencing saturated life in their own social contexts. I am particularly conscious of the Palestinian People who have been rendered homeless due to the recent war between Hamas and Israel. I am conscious of the suffering people of Sudan who are experiencing cultural genocide at the hands of terroristic militias driven by ideological hate. I am conscious of the victims of violence being carried out by herdsmen in Nigeria. I am also conscious of the civilian victims of the current war being fought between Iran, the United States, and Israel. As recipients of saturated life, which is mediated through the abundant nature of Lent, may our sacrifices during this season bring about an end to violence in these regions and around the world. In a spirit of solidarity, may our call for peace be decisive so that at the end of Lent, we can all gather the fruits of saturated life which the grace of Lent helps to mediate. Happy Lent!