First Sunday of Lent – 22 February 2026

A number of years ago, Sean Penn directed one of the most extraordinary films I have seen: Into the Wild. The film tells the true story of Christopher McCandless, a 22-year-old who leaves behind his family and possessions to wander across the United States, eventually seeking the vast solitude of the Alaskan wilderness.

Many reviewers saw the story as a celebration of the American pioneering spirit. But the deeper journey is not geographical — it is spiritual and psychological. The physical isolation McCandless chooses mirrors an inner isolation that has already taken hold of his life. For Christopher, that isolation becomes toxic. Yet just before his death — alone in Alaska, having mistakenly eaten a poisonous plant — there is a fragile moment of clarity. In his journal he writes, “All true happiness is shared.”

All along his journey, relationships had tried to claim his heart. People had reached out in love and friendship. Again and again, he kept them at arm’s length. He sought happiness on his own terms, in radical self-sufficiency. But at the edge of death, he realizes what he had resisted: happiness is not something we construct alone. It is something discovered and received with others.

“All true happiness is shared.”

That insight touches the heart of the Gospel we hear today. In the wilderness, Jesus confronts the fundamental human temptation: the temptation to self-sufficiency — the illusion that we are invulnerable, autonomous, in control. It is the same temptation described in Genesis: the desire to be self-defining, self-sustaining, needing no one — not even God.

Lent is given to us to expose that illusion. It reminds us that we need something — Someone — beyond ourselves.  We are led into the desert not to prove our strength, but to discover our dependence. There is a paradox here. It is in solitude that we learn we are not meant to live alone. Jesus enters the desert in solitude and there rejects the illusion of self-sufficiency. He affirms instead his radical dependence on the Father. So it must be with us.

But solitude is not simply physical aloneness. We can feel solitude in the middle of a crowd. It appears when we feel misunderstood. When words fail. When we sense a distance between ourselves and those we love. It visits us in sickness, in failure, in discouragement. It confronts us in our mistakes and sometimes in depression.

Solitude is the experience of our inner loneliness — and the courage not to run from it.

And we are very skilled at running. We fill the silence with noise. We crowd our schedules. We lose ourselves in endless distraction. Anything rather than face ourselves without pretence — to acknowledge our needs and our hunger as they truly are.  Yet Lent invites us to be truthful about that loneliness. Beneath all our activity, there is a hunger in us. We hunger for love. For acceptance. For understanding. For communion.

Often, we are afraid of how deep that hunger runs. So, we pretend it is not there. Or we try to satisfy it with things that cannot truly nourish us. We distract ourselves, indulge ourselves, or harden ourselves — and in the end, we are left even hungrier.  In the desert, Jesus feels hunger. And in our own deserts, so do we.

Lent is not primarily about proving our willpower. It is not a spiritual self-improvement program. Self-discipline has its place, but self-discipline alone does not make us Christian. “Going without” is not the heart of the season. The heart of Lent is learning dependence — learning again that we are not self-sufficient. That may mean not only giving something up but taking something on: making the phone call we have avoided; accepting an invitation; reconciling with someone; deepening our prayer; allowing ourselves to be known. These are not small gestures. They are acts of shared life. They are refusals of isolation.

Because “all true happiness is shared.”

In discovering our need — and in bringing that need before God — something new begins to grow. In the heat of our own deserts, grace takes root. When we relinquish the illusion that we can go it alone, we make space for communion: with God, and with one another.

Christopher McCandless learned that lesson at the very end of his life.  For us, the grace of Lent is this: that we may learn it now — and live.