Is Lent about reaching a greater level of perfection?  Read on.

It does not matter what level of perfection you reach.  What others think or don’t think of how much you does not matter, not does your judgment of yourself.  All that matters if that mercy has taken you for ever, for the very origin of your existence.  Mercy called you to love, because mercy loved you.

Holiness means always affirming–before everything else, in everything else–the embrace of the Father, the merciful, pitying movement of Christ, his gesture, that is he himself, independent of everything that stirs and has the appearance of life in us. . . .

We must become more and more aware of God’s covenant with us, of life as God’s involvement with us, and therefore of the absolute and unmistakable importance of the irrational influence of our outbursts, of our projects.

Nothingness, destruction, exile is the life proper to the world, especially our life, without this covenant, which remains in me even in the destruction and in the desolation caused by my wicked heart.  Grace holds fast because God leads me to discover what he is and to understand that from my destruction he makes something new bud forth–an identification with him and the Father.

(Servant of God Luigi Giussani)