"After all your Lents do you see any progress?"
Thus the question put to me by a freshman at the (first-class Liberal Arts Catholic) College where I am chaplain, a question which won't stop nagging me.
I never thought of Lent explicitly in those terms before, of measured progress, as with the life of virtue/vice (for example in our devotion of frequent confession, deliberately trying to uproot the predominant fault by exercising the opposite virtue). 40 days is ample time to acquire the virtue of the "Lenten Fast," which one might (and, perhaps, should) freely and joyfully continue throughout Easter and the whole year. That is the implication of his question. How has Lent made you better? And the succeeding years one should do the same, with a new virtue every Lent! In other words, if we are doing Lent right, the rigor, having become habitual, is no longer rigorous but pleasurable and easy: a virtue! And that virtue is itself a cause of Easter joy.
This really changes my perspective on the Lenten penance. Lent could become the school of permanent change, instead of an exercise in temporary "virtue" to be quickly discarded at Easter, returning routinely then to the troublesome vice of before. Why shouldn't we Christians revel gladly and freely in a life of great (indeed, heroic) and ever growing virtue, growing from Easter to Easter, to the eternal Easter of every perfection!
P.S. This, exactly this, might be my sermon for tomorrow, the Sunday of the Octave of Easter (Quasimodo Sunday).