Pope Leo’s Lenten message this year invited people of good will to focusing on listening, fasting from hurtful words, and fostering love through quality conversations. Recent scientific research highlight how positive interactions positively shape personal wellbeing. Living this harmony of truth, speaking positively and creatively, can transform the world.
Key Takeaways
Fasting during Lent can include abstaining from hurtful words.
Quality interactions, even brief ones, significantly boost well-being.
Love and trust are more powerful than control in influencing others.
Essay
In his Lenten message for this year, Listening and Fasting: Lent as a Time of Conversion, Pope Leo invited the faithful not only to fast from food but also to fast from words, to practice a simple yet demanding form of abstinence by refraining from language that offends or wounds our neighbor. In a world saturated with political conflict and heated rhetoric, this call feels provocative and timely. Tensions do not begin far away; they begin within each of us and in the ordinary relationships closest to home. When the news leaves us feeling powerless, wondering what we could possibly accomplish as individuals on the world stage, we are reminded that God works from the inside out. Real change starts with becoming the people we are called to be and loving those immediately around us. If every household embraced this discipline, the world would already be transformed.
Scripture insists on the power of speech and the importance of speaking well. Chapter four of Ephesians commands, “No foul language should come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for needed edification, that it may impart grace to those who hear.” (Ephesians 4: 29) The instruction is positive: speak words that build up and bestow grace. This vision echoes in the heart of Christian theology. Christ is the WORD made flesh, and the God who spoke creation into being invites us to participate in that same creative work. Our words can generate new ideas, forge bonds of love, and bring goodness into existence. Speaking is a way of participating in God’s act of creation.
Contemporary research confirms what faith has always proclaimed. A study completed in 2023, by lead researcher Jeffrey Hall, and published in 2025 in the Journal of Communication Research titled “Quality Conversation Can Increase Daily Well-being,” (source) identified seven concrete behaviors that foster deep connection:
Catching up: sharing recent events in one another’s lives
Meaningful talk: discussing important, deeper topics
Joking around: using humor and playfulness
Showing care: expressing genuine concern
Listening: giving another person full, undivided attention
Valuing another: making someone feel that their opinion matters
Offering a sincere compliment: genuine praise
The findings were clear: even a single quality interaction in a day can measurably increase well-being. Quality of interactions matter more than sheer quantity, though both contribute; and face-to-face conversations consistently outperform those conducted by phone or online. These results are in harmony with what is found in Scripture.
The path to transformation does not begin with winning an argument but with the willingness to receive, hear, and truly see the other person. Bonds of relationship, shape minds more powerfully than abstract ideals. Love creates the context in which truth can be received.
We see this pattern vividly in the Gospels, particularly in the intimate, personal conversations Jesus shares throughout the Gospel of John. Time and again, encounter precedes conversion. The Church has taught these truths for centuries and now empirical research supplies the data that corroborate revelation. The truth is symphonic. What God reveals in Scripture harmonizes with what He reveals in creation. The Word that spoke the universe into being, the universe that scientists research, is the same Word that speaks to us through sacred text.
In the moment of choosing our words, we can be challenged by the human impulse to control. Often, when we press others to change, especially those closest to us, we act from a place of fear. We fear they will not reach heaven, or, we fear how their choices reflect on us. The desire to “convert” someone can become an attempt to save ourselves rather than an act of trust in God. Once we place God firmly at the center of our life, once He is our source of comfort and security, the need to control resolves into trust, trust in God’s power, His providence, and His love.
This is where the image of the symphony becomes especially powerful. The truth we proclaim must ring true in every measure of our lives: our words, our actions, our silences, our relationships. When people encounter that harmony, the Gospel becomes compelling not because of convincing arguments but because of lived integrity. Fasting from wounding words is daily training in trust. It is the refusal to let fear dictate our speech and the decision to let love shape our conversations.
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