Lent Traditions

The season of Lent began on Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2018.  That date was also Saint Valentine’s Day.  Both Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day were overshadowed this year by the tragic mass shooting in Parkland, Florida.  Lent begins with Ash Wednesday and ends forty days later—those forty days represent Jesus’ sojourn (not just fasting) in the desert.  Just as Jesus prepared for his ministry through his desert ordeal, so the faithful seek to prepare themselves for Easter through prayer, penance, fasting, and self-denial.

The Tuesday before Ash Wednesday is called Shrove Tuesday or Fat Tuesday and is usually a day of carnival-like celebrations (Mardi Gras is French for “Fat Tuesday).  On this day before, the “faithful” gather to party and frolic—gorging themselves with whatever it is they plan to give up for Lent, traditionally richer, fatty foods, and the frolic.  This practice has never made any sense to me.  Why party and gorge yourself and then the next day “give up” partying and gorging and pretend to be someone other than you were the night before?   I wonder if Jesus had a big party before he went wandering off into the desert to “find the way he was to tell of God”?  

Such practices as Shrove Tuesday and even giving up something for Lent always remind me of Tevye and the cast of “Fiddler on the Roof” singing “Tradition.” Why do we do what we do?   We don’t know.  Why do we think as we do.  We don’t know. It is simply tradition.  You don’t question it, you don’t think about it, you just accept it and do it.  As Socrates said of life (“the unexamined life is not worth living”) so I would say of tradition (the unexamined tradition is not worth having).

What are you “giving-up” for Lent?  I have always encouraged the faithful to “take on” something rather than “giving-up” something.  “Take on” being a good neighbor, husband, wife, son, daughter.  “Take on” a stranger and make him or her a friend.  My encouragement  of such “take on” practices during Lent have gone over about as well as my insistence that Christmas is a season of twelve days rather than one day!  I still think there are more “take on’s” in Jesus’ teaching than there are “giving-up’s,” but tradition (no matter how irrational) must continue (so they say) even if we don’t know what they mean, where they came from, or why we blindly follow them.    

My great granddaughter questioning the way things are
 and whether or not they have to be that way.