The Unexpected Benefits of Being Retired When Lent Arrives

I've been fully retired since I moved to Wilber in 2017, and I tend to agree with this article, though I'm still so busy that I have to make time for prayer.

From Aleteia

By Cirith Gardiner

Retirement rarely unfolds as the leisurely chapter many imagine, yet when Lent arrives, it often brings unexpected and quietly welcome gifts.

Retirement is often imagined as a season of abundant free time, long mornings, and leisurely afternoons. Many retirees, of course, know better. Days quickly fill with school runs for grandchildren, volunteer commitments, appointments, travel, half-finished projects, and the curious discovery that life does not, in fact, slow down quite as dramatically as promised.

And yet, when Lent arrives, something subtly shifts.

Even for those with full schedules, retirement brings a different relationship with time. The pressures are not absent, but they are rearranged. The anxieties that once revolved around deadlines, performance reviews, or workplace demands tend to loosen their grip. Life may remain busy, but it is busy in a different key, often allowing a little more interior space than earlier decades permitted. And this is where Lent begins to feel quietly distinctive.

For many retirees, the season’s practices are no longer squeezed awkwardly between professional obligations. Prayer need not compete with an overflowing inbox. Attending Mass can sometimes become a more natural part of the week rather than a carefully negotiated exception. Even small devotional habits, easily crowded out in working life, find room to breathe.

There is also something gently liberating about the absence of certain forms of urgency. A retired day, however active, often carries fewer artificial pressures. Moments of waiting, pauses between tasks, or quieter stretches of the afternoon present themselves with unexpected frequency. These become small but welcome openings where reflection slips in almost unnoticed. Lent, after all, is not measured by how much one does, but by how one attends.

The rhythms of the liturgical year no longer interrupt life; they shape it

Later years often bring their own quiet advantages to this attentiveness. Experience has a way of softening the relentless need for novelty and sharpening appreciation for what endures. Faith, cultivated across decades, tends to feel less like an obligation and more like a familiar companion. The rhythms of the liturgical year no longer interrupt life; they shape it.

Even Lenten themes themselves can feel surprisingly well suited to this stage. Detachment, simplicity, reflection, gratitude — these are not foreign spiritual exercises but dispositions life has already been gently forming. Perspective, hard-won through years of joys and disappointments, lends the season a depth that youth rarely possesses.

Of course, retirement carries its own challenges, sometimes substantial ones. Health concerns, shifting family roles, unexpected solitude. Yet Lent has always spoken most directly to the realities of human limitation. Its invitations do not demand heroic feats, but openness, patience, and trust — virtues often refined precisely through the passage of time.

Perhaps the real benefit of Lent in retirement lies here. Not in having empty days, but in recognizing that even full ones can be inhabited differently. The season offers permission to linger, to notice, to rediscover familiar practices with fresh appreciation.

And for many retirees, seasoned veterans of life’s unpredictability, Lent may feel less like an imposition and more like what it has always been meant to be: a gentle return to what matters most.