This is the real meaning of every real "penitential" commitment: to withdraw from the current of exterior things, to silence the advancing hubbub of so many human voices, in order to return into oneself, into one’s deepest inner life; because it is in the silence of conscience that God waits for us….

That "shutting the door" corresponds to the one decisive opening of the human heart: the opening to God….

In the meeting with God there is the reward to which every human heart aspires: the experience of forgiveness and spiritual liberation.

Penitence, therefore, is not just effort; it is also joy. Sometimes, in fact, it is a great joy of the human spirit, a joy that cannot spring from other sources.

Does it not seem to you that many people have lost …. this joy? They have lost it because they have mislaid the deep sense of that spiritual effort which makes it possible to find oneself again in the whole truth of one’s own humanity.

Our civilization, especially in the West—connected as it is with the development of science and technology—glimpses the need of the intellectual and physical effort.

It does not, on the other hand, sufficiently consider the importance of the effort necessary to recover and promote moral values, which constitute the most authentic inner life of man. And it pays for it with that sense of emptiness and confusion which the young feel especially, sometimes even dramatically.

The severe liturgy of Ash Wednesday and, subsequently, the whole period of Lent constitute a systematic call to the rediscovery of those values, and to a renewed experience of that meeting with Christ, which alone can give life its full meaning.

Let us say so clearly: Lent is the path towards the joy of the meeting with the risen Christ.

—Excerpted from a talk to students and their teachers at a general audience at St. Peter’s Basilica on February 28, 1979.