Random Thoughts After The Carnival

As you see the work of the German romanticist painter Carl Spitzweg (1808–85) entitled Ash Wednesday, the message conveys the end of Carnival. That's right, dear minions, the party is over. And, in the words of Smokey Robinson: "Just like Pagliacci did, I try to keep my sadness hid ..."

Wait, that's a different clown.

Today, the Western church begins the season of Lent, known in Latin as Quadragesima ("forty days"). And yes, if you don't count the Sundays, the days starting with this day, going on six and a half weeks through Holy Saturday, it really does last for forty days, as is demonstrated by the convenient chart below (which you can tell was made in Europe because the week starts with Monday, which we all know is wrong ... but that's another story).

Lent is one of the two major penitential seasons of the Church Year, the other being Advent (which, while not totally penitential, is still kinda sorta penitential). The rules for the Dioceses of the United States of America are, that every person fourteen years or older must abstain from meat (and items made with meat) on Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, and all the Fridays of Lent. Of course, they really should abstain from meat on Fridays year round, or devise "an alternate form of penance."

But we all know that's bogus, don't we?

Every person between the age of eighteen and fifty-nine must fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. That means you only have one full meal on those days, and that the other two meals are "light collations" (or in Yiddish, a "nosh"), which together do not add up to the full meal. Oh, and no in-between meal snacks either.

This presumes, of course, that there is a discernible end to the main meal and the beginning of the light collation. I never understood how that works. It's like someone rings a bell that says: "Okay, kids, the meal is over, the no-eating-between-meals begins!"

Duh!

People go to church on this day, even though this is not a holyday of obligation, if for no other reason, to be marked with ashes on their foreheads. The priest or deacon will say these (or similar?) words:

Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

(Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.)

Of course, not all those you see on the streets so marked are Catholic. The practice has long been popular with Anglicans and Lutherans, and has also become common among "Methodists, Moravians, Nazarenes, Independent Catholics, as well as by many from the Reformed faith."

Thank you, Wikipedia.

Walk the streets of your city or town, and people make no attempt to hide the mark of the season. (Neither does Bret Beier of Fox News.) At my office two blocks west of the White House, the nearest location for me to receive ashes would be Saint John's Episcopal Church, located just north of Lafayette Square, which is just north of the White House (hence its being known as "The Church of the Presidents"). Of course, for a dedicated Catholic, that isn't quite the same, is it?

Maybe what nobody knows won't hurt them, don't you think?

Or don't you?