2026 Daily Lenten Journey Day 28 – One Step at a Time

Today the Church commemorates a great saint, one who helps understand our journey to heaven. Saint John ‘of the Ladder’ wrote a famous book about the steps to heaven. The Ladder of Divine Ascent reminds us that the way to heaven is one step at a time.

The first step of any journey is the most important. Heard on the back of last week’s invitation from Christ to ‘deny ourselves’ and take up our cross and follow Him, until we choose to renounce the world, we will never take up our cross. We will never follow Christ.

I encourage you to fight temptation to ‘leap up’ the ladder trying to get to the top ‘faster’ by avoiding the lower struggles. Like any journey, when we skip the proper steps, we risk getting lost. We risk ending up in the wrong place.

Imagine climbing the wrong ladder. This week, our fifth week of Great Lent, I invite you to focus on the first step. Allow your increased fasting and your increased prayer to help you renounce the world. Truth be told. The first step is the hardest. It is also most important.

The 30 Steps (Rungs) of the Ladder

• Renunciation of the world (detachment from worldly life)
• Detachment (freedom from material/emotional desires)
• Exile or Pilgrimage (separating from sin and temptations)
• Obedience (submission to a spiritual father)
• Repentance (painstaking, true repentance)
• Remembrance of death
• Joy-making mourning (sorrow for sins)
• Freedom from anger (meekness)
• Remembrance of wrongs (letting go of malice)
• Slander (avoiding gossip/calumny)
• Talkativeness and silence
• Lying
• Despondency (overcoming laziness/acedia)
• Gluttony (mastering the stomach)
• Incorruptible purity and chastity
• Love of money (avarice)
• Poverty (voluntary, to hasten heavenward)
• Insensibility (deadening of the soul/mind)
• Sleep, prayer, and psalm-singing
• Bodily vigil
• Unmanly and puerile cowardice
• Vainglory (forms of seeking human praise)
• Mad pride and blasphemous thoughts
• Meekness, simplicity, and guilelessness
• Humility (the destroyer of passions)
• Discernment (of thoughts, passions, and virtues)
• Holy solitude (of body and soul)
• Prayer (mother of virtues)
• Heaven on earth (dispassion/perfection)
• The Trinity of Virtues (Faith, Hope, and Love)

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