A Simple Path Through Lent
Father Laurence's weekly reflections for Lent 2026
Ash Wednesday
Dear Friends,
We are about to begin a new Lent. For seekers everywhere, especially for us as meditators, it is a chance to discover afresh what attention and compassion truly mean for the world. and our own lives. We start again from where we are.
In a hectic and anxious age, polarised, violent and so often lacking simple kindness we need a Lent of hope and interiority. In such times, our contemplative practice — both our inner voice and active example — is more important than ever. Let’s try to renew our daily practice, seeing it as a gift richly invested in our lives as a small but positive exercise of ascetic discipline. It bears fruit in the hope and joy of the Resurrection which is where we are heading through these forty days.
To support you during this journey, here are a few suggestions:
The First Day of Lent
Join us online on Ash Wednesday, 18 February at 10:30am (CET, France) for a live session, a teaching to open Lent concluding with the ancient ritual of the ashes.
More info here (this event is in the past)
Weekly Lenten Reflection
Subscribe to our mailing list to receive a weekly Lenten reflection every Sunday.
A Daily Companion
My book Sensing God – Learning to Meditate During Lent is a daily companion and can be used as a guide to starting or renewing your practice. It is available in paperback and digital formats. (See on Amazon or Medio Media)
A Lenten Practice
You may also choose to add an extra meditation during Lent, even a short one in the middle of the day, or identify a habit you would like to reduce or let go of. Lent resolutions are a good idea: they soon teach us we are not perfect but we can always start again.
Holy Week Retreat
Consider coming to Bonnevaux in person for our Holy Week retreat, which is also online. The rituals of the Triduum, its last three days, always make the mysteries of Death and Resurrection fresh with wonder.
May we all grow in love and kindness together during this Lent.
Love,
Reflection on the Gospel for the First Sunday of Lent 2026
The Temptation in the Desert: Matthew 4:1-11
Pope Francis proposed that the phrase in the Our Father ‘Lead us not into temptation’ should be translated differently. He felt it gave the misleading impression that God lures us into temptation and sets traps for us: as if God enjoys playing God with us and smiles when we fall into the trap. He proposed a clearer version: ‘Do not let us fall into temptation’.
It’s worth reflecting on these options as we enter Lent with the gospel account of Jesus being led by the Spirit into the desert where he is tempted by the devil after his fast. At that point, he was bound to be especially weakened and vulnerable when the devil turned up. Deep within himself Jesus perhaps felt how easy it would be to slip into one or all three parts of the ego’s web of illusion.
The first is to rely on the material substitutes for reality and so avoid the endless challenges it presents to us in daily life. How much easier it is to slip into self-indulgence and justify using our power or gifts in egocentric ways (turning stones into bread) – easier than learning what enduring the desert has yet to finish teaching us. Secondly, he waved away the temptation to throw himself off the pinnacle of the temple just to show that the angels would rescue him. How tempting is the illusion of the deluded pride of egoism to use risk to avoid engaging with reality and fall into the comforting nets of illusion. Thirdly, he shatters the temptation to expel ourselves altogether from reality by enthroning the impulses and cravings of the ego for power and control.
The Desert Teachers believed that we need temptations and tribulations in order finally to break out of the web of illusion and self-deception. It is good to see that we are making progress in living life as a spiritual path but dangerous to be complacent and think the old patterns will never try to return. ‘Be vigilant’, therefore, ‘at all times. That’s what the desert experience is about – staying awake. Abba Sisoes was on his deathbed, his face shining like the sun and surrounded by his disciples. When the angels came to take him, he asked for a little more time to repent. The younger monks, who thought he was perfect, asked him why he had asked for more time. He replied, ‘Amen, I tell you, I do not think I have even begun to repent’.
The myriad temptations to the illusions of pride are part and parcel of the school of life. Just when you feel you’ve got it under control, the insinuating whisper can return. Not from the Spirit who accompanies us into the desert and never leaves us at the mercy of the forces of darkness even when we fall into temptation. Temptations come from the human inclination under duress or disappointment to deny truth and choose the unreal over the real.
Facing this human weakness is what the desert is about and why we meet more than the devil there. We meet the Spirit who always has our back. In front of us we see and are helped by radiant angels when we need them, for just as long as we need them.
Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him. (Mt 4:11)
Reflection on the Gospel for the Second Sunday of Lent 2026
The Transfiguration: Matthew 17:1-9
Last week we were in a desert facing our demons and then being looked after by angels who spend a little time comforting us. This week we are atop a misty mountain and our beloved, though mysterious and elusive teacher, reveals himself to us in a way that shatters our hope of any real intimacy with him. We see him (as Arjuna saw Krishna in Chapter 11 of the Gita) in his cosmic glory, his physical body and whole being blindingly translucent. We see what we might have suspected: that the truth of him transcends the realm of time and space in which we felt drawn to him. Maybe we are hugely privileged to see this but we are utterly unable to respond adequately and so we look away and are terrified. Then, without our seeing it, he comes close again in a way we recognise, touches us and tells us not to be afraid. He is again how we have always known him, yet we can never forget what we have seen even though we might want to.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could be content merely to see things at the level of appearance? Yet, even when we are not in one of those rare moments, glimpsing the real in the unreal, the eternal in the transitory, even if we are comfortably ensconced in the mundane level of awareness, we cannot help but sense that what appears is never the whole truth. Life entails the risk that blinding truth might break through the familiar at any instant and upturn everything. We long for this almost as much as we fear it.
Fear is instinctive and chemical and self-centred: the amygdala sends SOS signals to the hypothalamus and I get a rush of adrenalin and cortisol. It is about saving my life as I know it and avoiding the risk of knowing it in any other way because I might lose control of it. So, I recoil from any change in a familiar pattern and desperately try to stay safe where I am even if it is a place and self-inflicted pattern of shame. Fear gives us the reason not to take the risk of an imprisoning pattern dissolving.
Even when we try to be free and creative, fear prevents us by imagining exposure and rejection. The possibility of trying and failing is terrifying. We balk at making even a small decision that might change things. If we do try, we pause half-way, feeling inauthentic in the uncompleted process that would change us. I turn back or go on at a snail’s pace. If someone, something, somehow doesn’t approach and touch us and tell us not to be afraid we might never reconnect to the courage to be human and alive.
This story strikes me as less of a manifestation of glory shining through the surface as a revelation of tenderness and patience that touches us deeper than the skin of things and suggesting a proof of what God is really like: so much more like us than we think.