It will be here before some have put away all of their Christmas decorations and certainly before everyone has tidied up from their Super Bowl parties. Ash Wednesday is Feb. 9.

Let me be the first to say I like Lent. I like slowing down the many distractions of life. I like focusing on important truth, reading and praying more while talking less. Seinfeld rerun junkie that I am, I look forward to the annual unplugging of the television and simplifications of diet that make room for Lenten work.

Lent never fails to bring me hard questions, some acutely painful, that tune my soul for Easter’s shout of new reality.

Several thoughts come to mind as I lean into Lent. Writing, preaching or teaching about Lent is dangerous work because there is nothing more damaging to the soul than a too-intense concern with other people's sins or even with their apparent need for what we tactfully call “growth.” To write or speak about what someone else should do in Lent brings the temptation to forget that one is also from the dust and is most certainly headed back that way.

Lent's first call is to put the focus on one's self, on the battle fought in every soul. For me that means asking how I am doing with Jesus’ summary of the law (Matthew 22: 36-40). More specifically, it means asking how my life does or does not resemble that described in the Baptismal Covenant. Above all, it means observing where I have to cringe or what I want to defend when meditating on the Litany of Penitence in the Ash Wednesday liturgy. What in or about me is getting in the way of doing what I believe I ought to do as Christ’s person? What piece of that can I work on in these six weeks?

Then there is the question of responsibility, without which Lent is meaningless. Living as we do in a culture that emphasizes rights and self-serving reasons and denials more than responsibilities, we easily might avoid looking hard at our motives and behavior because many of us can point to how we have been deeply wounded or conditioned by circumstances not of our making. Given what’s happened to me, how can any of this be my fault, my own most grievous fault?

The not entirely comfortable word here is that, for all of us, life is made up of paradoxes. Chief among these is the reality that, while each of us is the result of our parents' genes and the upbringing they and others gave us, what we make of that background is our responsibility. There is a space between stimulus and response, Stephen Covey has said, where we can reinvent ourselves and our world by the choices we make.

Because each of us has a different genetic makeup and because our own upbringing and other fundamental experiences vary so widely, each of us is beset by a different set of opportunities, challenges and temptations. Some truly do have to work harder at life than others. Nonetheless, the paradox continues in the obligation to work hard, perhaps in different venues, at dealing with old issues while struggling to shape present behavior.

It is not a surprise then, that in the ashes I find it written that I may do certain pretty good deeds because they interest me. I may do some because I was taught to do them as a child. Some are downright fun; some even scratch an inner itch. Beyond that, I may find that I do not commit some sins because they do not interest me very much or because they have ceased to interest me. That is not a picture of virtue, nor is it license to raise an eyebrow at those who are drawn to those sins I do not commit or who are not drawn to those good works I sometimes practice.

Where Lent builds virtue, spiritual muscle, is in the resistance to those sins my background and experience do incline me to commit, even if it is not my fault that I am shaped that way. Even more, Lent builds virtue as I put on and try out those acts and attitudes that do not interest me in the least.

It is certainly important to be a good steward of my leanings toward good things. In Lent, however, I find it useful to cultivate virtue against the grain, exploring new territory. For me at least, this is hard work. The death to self involved in leaving the bad or embracing the good draws me to Christ, both in his agony and in his new life. The heightened awareness of his walking beside me on this 40-day journey is perhaps why I like Lent so much in the first place.

Additional columns and sermons by Marshall are available at http://www.diobeth.org/. To respond to this column, write to artandsoul@episcopal-life.org