Today is the fifth and final Sunday of Great Lent: though our fasting continues, the Forty Days end this coming Friday, to be followed by the brief but liturgically distinct two-day Feast of Palms, which in turn gives way to Holy Week.
It is during these final days of the Great Fast – the fifth Thursday and the fifth Sunday, especially – that we contemplate the memory of St. Mary of Egypt. Her life serves to remind us that repentance is not the work of one day or even forty days. Rather, just as St. Mary spent the greater part of her life in the desert, remaining there to her dying day, repentance must be for us, too, a lifelong and daily labor. Lent may end, but our need for repentance does not.
In order to make this abiding repentance something more than a vague aspiration, it may be beneficial to adopt some concrete practices, such reciting Psalm 50 daily (or several times a day) and/or making a daily confession of our sins to God at the end of each day. This latter practice, by the way, is no replacement for the Sacrament of Confession; it is, however, a very useful way to prepare for the sacrament.