A Season for Softening
"But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.” - Mt 6:1-6, 16-18
Ash Wednesday arrives not with noise but with a hush, inviting us to pause, breathe, and reconnect with our deepest selves. Prayer, like Lent, does not demand perfection but presence. It is an invitation to show up as we are, not as we think we should be. There, compassion can meet us, embracing our joys, sorrows, hopes, and burdens with tenderness.
It has been over six months for me journeying with the women of the Ignatian Spirituality Project, women who know what it means to lose everything and yet hold onto hope. Their journeys through homelessness and addiction have changed me, revealing how resilience and healing can be found in the most unexpected places: a warm meal, another evening under a safe roof, the joy of watching hummingbirds flit through a backyard, the grief of losing a beloved pet after ten years, the triumph of moving from a shelter into a studio apartment. And perhaps most profoundly, healing is found in the simple but transformative gift of being seen, heard, and encouraged. These women are not distant figures. They are a part of my community, my world.
After the Los Angeles wildfires left many with nothing but ashes, these women, intimately acquainted with loss, did not retreat into despair or bitterness. Instead, they held these strangers in their prayers at every gathering, grieving and mourning with those they had never met. They asked and prayed for strength for the firefighters battling the infernos and the weary hands rebuilding what was lost. Their prayers were not grand performances but quiet offerings of love, the kind of prayer Matthew describes - humble, gentle, and deeply authentic. Their compassion undid me. They carried suffering not as a weight to be avoided but as a shared burden, refusing to let the world’s harshness steal their tenderness. They did not shrink from sorrow but stood within it, openhearted, knowing that suffering does not have the final word.
Lent calls me to embrace that kind of tenderness. As Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ has often expressed in his books and interviews, Lent asks me to step beyond my comfort so that the margins can disappear, not so that I can “make a difference” but so that it can make me different - to have my heart transformed, spirit expanded, and soul softened by grace. Perhaps this season is about letting go of what weighs us down so that healing has space to enter. Maybe fasting is not about absence but making room for the goodness already stirring within. Perhaps prayer is less about words and more about allowing peace to envelop us. Perhaps almsgiving is not just giving but offering love and presence, allowing compassion to soften us, just as it has sustained those who have suffered and still hold onto hope.
Lord, help slow my heart, open my hands, and find You in the quiet spaces where love is made.
Tam Lontok