Secular suffering for nothing

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent.

While Catholic observances tend to at least somewhat baffle those who are not familiar with them, and therefore reinterpret them either though the bigoted Anglicization of popular history they've received, or through their own broken lenses on the world, lots of people are at least somewhat familiar with them.  One of the things they're somewhat familiar with is fasting.

We've dealt with this before, but Latin Rite Catholics have a minimal duty of fast and abstinence during Lent.  And it is indeed very minimal. The fast days are now down to two.  There are more days of abstinence during Lent.

And this post isn't about that.

Rather, this post is about American secular suffering and its pointless nature.

I'm occasionally the accidental unwilling silent third person in a long running conversation between two people on diets, which they're constantly off and on. The oddity of it is that neither of the two people involved have any need whatsoever to be on a diet. They aren't even ballpark close to being overweight.  None the less, they'll go on diets and the diets tend to be based on pseudoscience.

I don't want to be harsh on people for this as there's now so much pseudoscience in American culture it's simply mind boggling. We've gone from a society that in the 1960s and 1970s emphasized science  to one that now abhors it and goes for non scientific faddism.  There are so many examples of this that actually going into all of it would require a blog the size of the Internet at this point.  Food faddism is common.

Not a day goes by when I don't get a bunch of spam posts (and how ironic that they'd be called "spam" devoted to dietary bullshit, most of which has to do with eating something that will "melt away fat", probably overnight so that you don't have to be inconvenienced while watching television during the day.  It's not going to do that.  A wild example of that is one that bills itself as some sort of ice cream, with the photographs in the spam showing chocolate ice cream.  Chocolate ice cream is disgusting in the first place, and it's not going to make you think.  

Anyhow, these two fit people are constantly on diets of the faddish variety, involving such things as "cleanses" and the like.  None of that does anything, at least not in the way a person thinks.  Some of it might, accidentally, such as abstaining from alcohol. That'll do something, but not in a cleanse fashion.  And some of it probably does something as it approaches a sort of low yield style of intermittent fasting.

I've now watched people on diets for decades, and I'm wholly convinced that none of them doing anything whatsoever.  I've watched people on Keto lose weight and then balloon back up to just as heavy as they were before, for example.  

Nothing ultimately escapes from the basic fact that weight=calories in-calories out.   That's it.

So you can be on keto, but if you eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, a ham for lunch, and then go eat a big dinner, you're going to be really heavy if you are an office worker.  Pretty simple.

That is why, I'll note, intermittent fasting actually does cause people to lose weight, but it's not a diet, it's fasting.  I'll also note that I'm not a doctor and I'm not telling you to fast to lose weight.  If you need to lose weight, see your doctor.  A real doctor.  Not the homeopathic doctor of Burmese weight loss and orthopody.  No, not him.  A real bonafide physician.  They exist.

Anyhow, I don't think that a lot of people need to go on diets at all, including the folks I just noted.

Now, some people really do. A lot of Americans are really, really, heavy.  Some say a majority are overweight.  I get that.  But none the less I'd guess about 60% of the people I see on diets or discussing diets are not overweight.  I don't think they go on diets, deep down, as they're overweight.

They do it as they need to be suffering for something.

Now, this gets back to Lent. Catholics don't fast and abstain in order to suffer. They do it in order to focus and build discipline, and sacrifice for their sins.  If it involves an element of suffering, well so do a lot of things.

But devoted Catholics accept suffering as part of life.  It's inescapable.  Life is full of suffering.  Part of that suffering is brought about by license.

The irony of freedom is that freedom to chose isn't freedom.  License doesn't actually equal liberty.  The freedom to chose is the freedom to chose wisely, and that brings a sort of real freedom.  It doesn't mean, kid like, that I can choose to eat ice cream for dinner, and it doesn't mean, modern society like, that I chose all the members of the opposite sex, or whatever, that I might fancy at the moment. 

And indeed, that sort of "freedom" leads not to freedom but to slavery.  People become enslaved to their wants.  A massive amount of American culture is now presently completely devoted to slavery of this type, particularly sexual slavery of both an intellectual and actual kind.  The entire pornography industry is a type of "white slavery", involving the prostitution of women and the enslavement of men to lust.

Catholic fasting ties into freedom as it has as an element the concept of building resistance to enslavement.  If you can say no to food you can also say no to alcohol, or tobacco, or to vice.  It might take practice, hence the discipline of fasting.

Which is also why the slow Latin relaxing of fasting and abstinence rules was, in my view, a real mistake.  The concept of the Church in North American, for example, that relaxing abstinence on Friday's throughout the year would result in the substitution of a meaningful personal substitute was, frankly, largely wrong.

And it achieves, of course, more than that.

Fasting, experienced as a form of self-denial, helps those who undertake it in simplicity of heart to rediscover God’s gift and to recognize that, created in his image and likeness, we find our fulfilment in him. In embracing the experience of poverty, those who fast make themselves poor with the poor and accumulate the treasure of a love both received and shared. In this way, fasting helps us to love God and our neighbour, inasmuch as love, as Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches, is a movement outwards that focuses our attention on others and considers them as one with ourselves.

Pope Francis, Lenten message, 2021.

Secular fasting doesn't actually achieve anything.  But then, much of modern American life is aimless and directionless.  It's been wholly focused on materialism and nothing else.  People aren't rooted to place or people as those things interfere with "freedom". They aren't bound by traditional rules of right and wrong, obligation and duty, service to country and community, or the obligations imposed by law outside of the civil law, those being the walls of canon law and natural law, and biological law.  They aren't even accepting of the final binds of death, which Americans don't acknowledge as real, and which provides the reason that at 40 years old you aren't going to be the physical specimen you were at 20, and things will certainly be different at 60.

Now, to be sure, most Catholics are no different in the modern world than anyone else.  A people who were once outside of the culture as they were different, where they were a minority, and were outside the world in a way as they were distinct from it even where they were a majority, now fall prey to all the modern vices that are portrayed as virtues, and self excuse those that are regarded by the Church as sins.  Some of the Church religious itself, mostly older baby boomer aged whose time is past but they don't realize it, still campaign to overthrow Church law in the name of temporal freedom, not realizing that they propose to bring in the chains of slavery.  None of that, however, changes the basic point.

Humans sense that abundance can be slavery.  They also reject so often the breaking of their chains. But even when they do, they reach out, darkly, to the disciplines that would free them.  They sense they have to do something, and often substitute suffering, vaguely, for the practices that would open the manacles.

The Week. Old Injuries and Old Addictions (Coffee, that is)

(Note, this thread was a draft that was on hold since some date in 2019. . . was doing some checking on old drafts and realized I hadn't posted it).

The past week, well two weeks, haven't been the greatest on Earth for me.

Not the worst either.  And all of these problems are in the nature of "First World" problems.  I.e,. they aren't real problems at all.

For Lent I gave up any alcohol, save in social settings.  This is not a particularly big deal save for the fact that as a lawyer, I am actually fairly frequently in social settings where having a beer is the  norm (or alternatively a cocktail, but I'm not a cocktail guy really, so I'll usually have a beer).  What giving up alcohol reminds you of is how often that's the case.

Other than that, it was no big deal.  I just didn't buy any beer, and still haven't, to bring home over Lent.  We have a lot of whiskey here right now which came in as gifts, but as I rarely drink it, that doesn't present a challenge to my Lenten resolutions.  I like beer on the other hand, but not so much that I need to be like people who give up smoking for Lent and then resume at 12:01 on Holy Saturday.  As more and more the evidence is, or might be, or could be, that any alcohol isn't really good for you, pretty advanced moderation is probably generally a good idea.

Coffee's another matter, apparently.

I just ran out of coffee sometime prior to Holy Saturday and I'm not going to make a special trip to the grocery store to buy it.  So I didn't.  I worked on Good Friday, the first day I'd run out, and thought I was doing fine but in reality I was really sleepy in a weird sort of way all day.

Anyhow, having gone a day without it, I just thought I'd keep on keeping on.  One less thing to buy at the grocery store.  Saturday I was less weirdly sleepy.  But still sleepy.  Oddly, I found that coffee is such a part of my morning routine that what was mostly missed is just drinking coffee.  Odd.  Anyhow, as I've been getting very  little sleep of late, this seemed like a good thing to omit.

And so into Sunday morning, by which time I'd actually bought a bag of Boyers as I had to go to the grocery store anyhow and my son tagged along with me, and he's picked up the coffee affliction.  So I had one cup.

Made quite a difference.

Monday I had an early morning trip to Gillette.  So I made a pot and drank it before I went.

I'm drinking coffee now.

Back into the coffee habit, I guess.

In my case, I don't know that this is good.  I do think that my work day is tense enough that I don't need a morning stresser.  I'll have to ponder this.

Adding to the stress is that on Saturday I re-injured my back.

I broke a couple of vertebrae when I was 13 in a skiing accident.  I broke both bones in my lower right leg in the same accident and the cracked vertebrae weren't detected at the time.  That injury was detected upon the occasion of my breaking a couple of ribs and collapsing a lung in my late 30s or early 40s.  An extra showed that the vertebrae had naturally fused as a result of the accident.

I've had as an adult the affliction, from time to time, of "aching back", but it wasn't up until then that I knew what actually caused it. As they are fused, it's nothing to be concerned about, as I've gotten along all these years just fine.  It rarely bugs me that much.

But on Saturday I sat in a camp chair that put all sorts of weird stresses on my back and by mid afternoon I was an absolute mess. By nighttime I was in agony.  I couldn't sleep hardly at all.  The next day I resorted to Tylenol which I rarely do.  Entire years go by where I don't take a painkiller.  But I had to take them for a couple of days.

I'm fine now, but that was the pits.

The Long Range Desert Group in North Africa. These guys needed to hydrate.

On odd stressers, yesterday I was in a deposition with a younger lawyer who believes in "hydrating".  I think hydrating, unless you are in an atholetic endeavor, is one of those modern items of baloney advaice that experts afflict people with in dietary fashions.  If you are thirsty, drink something.  Otherwise, being in the basement of a bank all day taking depositions doesn't require you to drink a half gallon of water.

What that will do, however, is make sure that you to go to the old latrine. . . a lot. We must have taken a zillion near emergency bathroom breaks. That's just embarrasing.

I speant most of my early youth outdoors as much as possible and still do if I can find time.  Before I went to basic training, I never carried water in the field.  Indeed, I only really started to after I had kids.  That's not really the smartest thing to do, but I do know that I can go all day without water, as I've done it a zillion times, in fairly active situations.  I'm not saying that's smart, and I now carry a canteen.  Even at that, however, I still come home usually with most of the water I took with me.

I hate those plastic water botters that show up everywhere now.  It's a weird modernism.  Bottling water in plastic is the antithesis of good planning in accordance with a concern for hte environment and its just goofy.  Anyhow, when a deposition starts at 9:00 the first concern I don't have, ever, is if there's anything to drink.  I don't ask for coffee myself in such situation and I certainly don't expect a basket or bucket of water.  I wouldn't drink half a gallon of it either.  We're not crossing the Sinai for goodness sakes.

Communications, Church, and COVID-10

When the Pandemic first started, I published this item on one of our companion blogs*:

Churches of the West: The Church and Pandemic.: St. Mary's Cathedral, Diocese of Cheyenne Wyoming. When this particular blog was started back in 2011 its stated purposes was...

I understand our Diocese's orders, to a degree, during the pandemic.  The Diocese had to close the door to public Masses.  It had no other humane choice.  Catholics are obligated to attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days and our community, where Catholics are a minority, has a grand total of at least ten Catholic Masses per weekend. That's a lot.  A lot of those Masses are heavily attended.

Added to this, during normal period on the liturgical calendar there are still things going on in the Church or Parish as rule.  Confessions are held weekly more frequently than that.  There are meetings. And there are Baptisms and Marriages.  So a lot is going on in a Church.

During Lent, even more is going on.

So those voices that proclaim that nothing should have been done to disrupt normal Parish life are flat out wrong. 

Which doesn't mean that the critics don't have a point.

Those critics, of course, have to be understood in the context of the Catholic (the word means "Universal") Church being global, but the churches being local.  That is, the local Bishop of a Diocese impacts the daily lives of average Catholics a lot more than the Pope does.

And that's where, at least to some degree, legitimate criticism can be levied.

The response to the pandemic has varied from diocese to diocese around the globe and from diocese to diocese around the country.  And it is not uniform in any sense, nor would we expect it to be.  So any criticism about the Bishops doing this or that are incorrect from the onset.  A person probably only really grasp what the Bishop of their Diocese is doing, although quite a few of them have done very similar things.  Our Diocese took one of the most extreme, if a person cares to define it that way, approaches.

All the sacraments were cancelled save for Confessions where there was a risk of death.

I'll be frank that I feel the order went way too far from the onset.  In a discussion with a very Catholic friend, he posed the question of "well, what if priests had become ill and died?", which is a highly legitimate point.   And I'm not arguing that we should have ignored the state's order and simply charged on as if nothing was happening.  But shutting down all the sacraments was simply too much.  As I pointed out to my friend, what about those who were to be married and simply shrugged their shoulders in our era of weak fealty and started keeping house, something we observant Catholics regard as a mortal sin?  And what about people who would have gone to Confession and simply took Pope Francis' suggestion of "perfect contrition" lightly, and figured they were good to go. Some likely have passed and some who don't study such things will simply assume that perhaps that counts from here on out and they don't have to observe the Church's laws in regard to at least an annual Confession?  And what about those who have simply accommodated themselves to televised Mass or no Mass at all, violation of the Church's canons though they are in normal times.  Everyone has met people who have allowed their consciences to become elastic to accommodate their personal desires or laziness. 

Indeed, the Church, as opposed to Protestant Churches, has at least in part kept a set of canons requiring participation for that reason.  Catholics regard it as a mortal sin not to go to Mass, if they can, on Holy Days and Sundays not because it's in the Bible, but because its a law imposed by the Church.  Indeed, Protestants rarely grasp that Catholics don't regard Protestant failing to observe Catholic Canons as committing serious sins, which is not to say that there aren't serious sins everyone is to avoid.  I.e, Protestants aren't expected to observe Catholic Holy Days for instance.

None of which, again, is to suggest that the Church should have ignored the virus and kept the public Masses.

But it is to say that the cancellation of everything else, where it occurred, and it occurred here, was a mistake.  Baptisms could clearly have been handled with low risk and there was never any sort of state order requiring them to be cancelled.  Marriages could have been too if the couples were willing to go forward with hardly anyone in attendance.  That anyone would consider that in this era would surprise many but I personally know a young couple who were married of their own volition in just such a way, and I myself recall stepping into the Church years ago on a Wednesday night when there was a marriage going on, elaborate white dress and all, with less than ten people in attendance.

Likewise, people being brought into the Church as adults could have been.

Confessions under some circumstances should have been allowed.  Yes, I don't want a line to the Confessional on Saturdays going on right now but cancelling all private Confession in a time of crises was not the right thing to do in my view.  There were ways to accommodate that.

And failing to grasp communications in this modern era is, in my view, an enormous failure.

A friend of mine who is a devout Catholic in Oklahoma tells me that in his archdiocese they are getting weekly emails from that archdiocese.

We aren't.

Now, to a degree, that doesn't surprise me.  Catholic parishes are large and no doubt the diocese doesn't have hardly any of our email addresses.  But it goes beyond that.

Our Bishops original orders expired on Thursday, April 30.  That should mean that a continuation of them in some form should have been widely distributed prior to that.

Nothing was.

What happened instead was a press release.

Now, most people don't get press releases and the Diocese doesn't even publish its own press releases, for the most part, on its website.  Checking it this morning what remains as the case is that there's a press release from back in January regarding the Diocese's actions in regard to a Bishop who served long, long ago.  While that story is real news and while the Diocese took the proper and strong action regarding it, most Wyoming Catholic probably didn't live in the state back then or weren't alive back then.  It's the sort of attention headline grabbing story that deserves to be an attention grabbing headline story, and which if the Press applied its  focus more broadly, would show up a lot more in regard to other institution, particularly schools.

But as far as the lives of average Catholics go, Mass closures matter a lot more.

And we're learning the status of that on the second page of the Tribune, with a headline reading, if you just read on line:

Cheyenne diocese says it will continue to suspend Mass through mid-May

Or, if you read the e-edition or print edition:

Mass Closures To Continue

Now, in fairness, the proactive Priests of the diocese will contact those that they can, or answer questions from those who pose them, and post an announcement to their online bulletins, or make a Youtube or Facebook announcement.  So it'll get out that way.

But is that good enough?

I'm submit it isn't. 

Indeed, delivering a press announcement in 2020 in a state where we're a large minority means that most people are left without anything unless they're proactive.  Most people don't read the newspapers anymore.  And an announcement delivered so late that it comes out the day of the vigil of Sunday is not going to get to most people.

In an earlier time, when a lot of Catholics lived in the Catholic Ghetto in the United States, or in Catholic communities, or where most Catholics in communities like ours where Catholics are a minority, had a means by which such news traveled pretty quickly, and often by the parish priest.  Parish priests weren't moved much, if at all, and they knew their parishioners.  Indeed, even here, it would have been the case that a lot of priests would have been in a community for decades, would have eaten frequently at parishioners homes, would have gone to their high school sporting events, and would have stopped by the Knights of Columbus, where a lot of the men would have been members, nightly to make sure that things were in control at the bar and people were heading home.

Some of that still occurs, but I frankly think it's a lot less than it used to be.  There are indeed still small parishes, or even large ones, where parishioners are really tight with a priest, but as Americans have lost connection with their own communities, which they have, that tight bond isn't there to the same degree, in my view.  Indeed, I don't think that tight bond is there with anything, which is why a writer like Wendell Berry would write a book called Becoming Native To This Place.  It's one of the huge holes in modern American life.

So, circling back, how does an oilfield worker from Texas get the news?  What about a junior accountant who moved up from Colorado?  You get the point.

Indeed, at this time a lot of Catholic parishioners are in the category of "vagabondi", moving from parish to parish as convenient, which is acceptable in the Church.  They donate where they go, but they aren't really listed anywhere, and they probably aren't being contacted.  Indeed, as far as I can tell, written communication around here has been pretty limited during the closure.

An assumption that on a Saturday morning most people are going to read the news in a newspaper and then call anyone they know who doesn't get it is flat out wrong, if such an assumption was made.  Simply waiting until Friday to say anything at all is likewise not a very good way to communicate anything to a group of people who are morally bound to attend Mass if they can.  It makes no sense at all.

The same news also informs the readers, most of whom will  not be Catholic, that Confessions by appointment are now resumed, which is a good thing, and that Masses after the 15th will be resumed but the present restrictions on public gathering, which actually will expire on that date, will also be observed.  I'm not sure what that means, but the size of gatherings is now very limited so, if that holds, and means what it says, logic would presume that the requirement to attend Mass will remain suspended as there's no earthly way to do that for all the Catholics in most parishes, even if Masses were run all day long on Sunday, which they can't be as Canon Law restricts the number of Masses a Priest can say in a day.  Perhaps that latter restriction makes sense, but we're still being informed of this in a very poor way.

As noted, every Diocese is different and this isn't applicable everywhere.  But rising to his crisis does not appear to have been done very well in Cheyenne.

If this seems to be asking for too much,and I'd strenuously argue it isn't, other institutions haven't been similarly lacking. The courts, for example, have been excellent in sending out information.  And the Diocese, in this modern era, does have a website where an announcement could have been placed front and center.

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*I debated posting this comment at all as I'm not disloyal, and I also wasn't sure if I should post it first here, or on that blog.  Ultimately I decided to post it, and here, as it is a local item for one thing, and a communications matter, at least in part, secondly.

Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday for those churches that follow the Catholic Latin Rite's liturgical calendar, which includes a fair number of Protestant churches.

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent for Western Christians, Lent being the (approximately) forty day long penitential season preceding Easter.  Great Lent, the Eastern Christian seasons, precedes Ash Wednesday and commences on Clean Monday for Eastern Christians on the new calendar, but not on the old calendar which has, of course, which departs from the calendar we're otherwise familiar with.   The day is named for the Catholic practice, which is observed by at least some Anglicans and Lutherans as well, of placing ashes on the foreheads of those who come to the Ash Wednesday service, with the reminder being made that from ashes you were made, and from ashes you will return.*

For Latin Rite Catholics, Ash Wednesday is a day of fast and abstinence.  I.e, they eat only one full meal on this day and it can't include meat, which under Latin Rite Catholic rules does not include fish.  For Eastern Christians a much stricter Lenten fast and abstinence set of rules applies.  This sacrifice serves the purpose of being penitential in nature.

It also serves to really set Catholics apart, as fasting and abstinence are the rage in the west now, but for purely secular purposes, not all of which square with science or good dietary practices.

For the members of the Apostolic faiths, Lent also serves as a time in which for penitential reasons they usually "give up" something.  A lot of people have a really superficial understanding of this, assuming that Catholic "give up" desert or chocolate or something, and in fact quite a few people do something like that. Indeed, as an adult I've been surprised by how many Catholics (usually men) give up drinking alcohol, which means that frequent consumption of alcohol is pretty common society wide in a way that we probably underestimate.

Indeed, just recently, on that, I was asked by an exuberant Catholic Midwestern expat, who seemingly has no boundaries at all, on what I was "giving up" for Lent. This was the week prior to Ash Wednesday at which time I wasn't particularly focused on it myself.  The same fellow asked at least one Protestant what she was giving up, with that Protestant being a member of one of the American millennialism religions, to receive a totally baffled reply.  Indeed, I'm sure they don't celebrate Lent at all, so the question was odd.  Anyhow, he was giving up alcohol and asked if I'd like to join him, to which I absent mindedly said sure.  Later he was wondering if I thought it would be tough, which I'm sure it won't be at all and I'll have to find something else to mark Lent really.  But that sort of "giving up" line of thinking is very common.

In a lot of Catholic cultures the Lenten penitential observations have traditionally been much stronger, which helps explain Mardi Gras as we just discussed.  Even well after the Latin Rite rules were very much relaxed, in many Catholic areas, including Catholic areas of the United States, people engaged in much more extensive penitential observations with the "giving up chocolate" type thing really sort of an introduction to the practice.  In Louisiana, without going into it too deeply, there was traditionally a big spike in births nine to ten months after Easter, which reflected a very widespread serious observation among Catholic couples as to their penitential practice, for example.

Some of that is really coming back, which reflects an interesting trend towards a deeper understanding of their faiths by members of the Apostolic faiths and even a return of Lenten traditions in some Protestant ones.  During the full "Spirit of Vatican Two" era there was a lot of attention devoted to not giving anything up but rather to work on some spiritual need.  I.e, be self reflective and work on what that lead you to.  At the same time, the misuse of the word "fasting" became very common, with there being advice, even from the clergy, to fast from things other than food or drink.  You can't really fast from sinful behavior, or from narcissism, for example.  You can't even "fast" from the Internet, although "giving it up" for Lent might be a darned good idea (one that I really ought to consider, probably).

A lot of that is now passing and there's been a real return to more traditional observations of Lent, including fasting but also forms of dedicated worship and observation.

Which brings me to the next thing about "giving up".  One feature of this season is that many Apostolic Christians, as it is the season of repentance, have used the season to break bad conduct when there's support, spiritual and temporal, for doing it.  People with alcohol problems will use it to break them, smokers will quit smoking during Lent so they can quit smoking.  And sometimes people with serious attachments to sin take it head on during Lent, with some people I've known even announcing the renouncement of what are very serious sins from a Christian purpose over Lent in the hopes of breaking from the permanently. And many who do that, succeed at doing that.

Which in turn takes us to our final observation.  This season, which is lead by the Apostolic faiths but which is observed by at least some of the Protestants as well, tend to turn the self indulgent retained Puritan abstinence on its head.  I've noted this before, but North American and the Northern Europe may have strayed enormously from Calvinist influence in terms of faith, but not in terms of the concept that public suffering is really necessary.  That retained concept explains in large part the real focus in these lands, as opposed to others, in "giving up" something for no real purpose other than the sense it must be done.  People give up all sorts of things that Apostolic Christians around the world give up for forty some days, and often on a declared permanent basis (they fail at it more often than not), with it being notable that the purely secular nature of that makes it shallow from the onset.  Indeed, plenty of people who will spend Lent scoffing at Catholics for Lent will spend part of the season or all of it on some no carb, or no meat, or whatever, diet, for no real reason other than a constructed one. Suffering, in many instances, is the ultimate goal of those efforts, but suffering without something to redeem it.

For Apostolic Christians, all fasts are followed by feasts, and that's something to remember.

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*I don't think this is a practice in the East and its not a requirement for Catholics, something that in fact even confuses some Catholics.  Ash Wednesday is widely observed by Catholics and the placing of the ashes isn't restricted to Catholics.  Perhaps for that reason quite a few Catholics assume it is a Holy Day of Obligation.

One thing of note here is that Ash Wednesday also serves to point out to everyone who is a Catholic, as if a person has ashes on their head, they're probably Catholic, although not necessarily.  By the same token, if you are known to be a Catholic and don't make it to Ash Wednesday you'll tend to get comments about it.

Fat Tuesday

Bear guiding.  A Polish Shrove Tuesday tradition.  No, I don't understand it.

Yesterday I marked Clean Monday.

Today is Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras.

The day marks the day before Ash Wednesday on the liturgical calendar of the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church.  Like the other major day noted in the United States, setting aside Christmas and Easter, which derives from the Catholic liturgical calendar, St. Patrick's Day, the day is celebrated widely in the US by folks who have no idea whatsoever what it marks.

The day is called "Fat" Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, in French as it marked the day when people in Louisiana, French speaking Catholics, attempted to use up excess fats in their household that would otherwise go to waste during the Lenten season.  The Lenten Fast in the Latin Rite is much less strict than it once was, so this isn't a problem today, but the tradition of having a big pre Lenten celebration remains.  In its original form, it was a major Franco North American celebration, but wasn't the sort of weird event its devolved into, featuring topless women and beads and the like.  Indeed, quite the opposite is true.  It had a religious nature to it.

This is also true in many other predominantly Catholic countries around the globe.  In Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries the day is also widely celebrated, with the use of a term which actually very closely approximates Mardi Gras or the use of the term Carnival, which means "to put away meat", derived from Latin.  Carnival is celebrated in some Catholic European cultures under that name as well, including southern Germany.  Germans also call the day Fastnachtsdienstag, Faschingsdienstag, Karnevaldienstag and Veilschendienstag.  The day is marked by a partial day off from school as well as parades and the observance of some distinctly odd German customs.

In English speaking countries where, outside of Ireland, the Reformation took them out of the Catholic world in the 1500s, the tradition none the less remains, reflecting how strong the Catholic customs were even where Protestantism came in.  Shrove Tuesday is widely observed in Anglican circles. "Shrove" in this context derives from an Old English word for "absolve", and it reflected the day which people reflected on their lives and resolved to work on them over Lent.  Lent is still a penitential season in the Anglican Communion, but has been much less observed than in the Apostolic faiths where its a major seasons.  Having said that, at least by observation, there seem to be a revival of Lenten observation in Anglican circules.

In English speaking countries today is also Pancake Tuesday or Pancake Day for the same reason that French speaking countries call it Mardi Gras.  Pancakes are made with fat and flour and there was an effort to use up fat by making big pancake breakfasts on this day.

Nearly every country with a Christian heritage, except perhaps those in North American, have a celebration on this day with a strong regional, national and Christian aspect to them, including those nations who followed Luther into the Reformation. The Icelanders, for example, feast today with salted fish and meats.  It's interesting how widespread this custom is, and in some ways makes the American celebration of it seem a bit poor in comparison, outside of those areas of the Louisiana and Texas where the locals are celebrating it for real.

As a final note, why would people be so focused, as part of this, in using up the household fats and meat?

Well, before refrigeration, and with a stricter fast in place, those things weren't going to last until after Easter.

Today is Clean Monday. . .

in those Eastern Rite Churches that are part of the Catholic Church in predominantly Latin Rite countries.  For Eastern Rite Churches that use the old calendar and for the Orthodox Clean Monday is on March 2, a week from today.

Clean Monday is the first day of  Great Lent in the East (although technically it actually starts the Sunday prior) and marks the beginning of the Lenten Fast, which is much broader in the East than the West.  Shellfish are the traditional entre, as they're an exception, and darned near the only one, to the prohibition on meat in the Eastern fast.

It's also a day of celebration and a public holiday in quite a few Orthodox nations and features the flying of kites, as its the traditional first day of spring in those cultures.

Don't get a celebration on a day commencing a long fast?  Well, its a fast with a purpose, not because of dietary fad or some public agony virtue signaling effort.  And ultimately, although it'll be forty days later, it'll be followed by a feast.

The secular left's perpetual surprise at arriving at the Catholic past.

 

 Cathedral of the Madeline, Salt Lake City Utah.

I started this post a very long time ago, something like over a year ago, and I"m just getting back around to it now.

Today is the start of Lent, Ash Wednesday, that more or less forty day period prior to Easter in which Catholics and the Orthodox, and often the faithful who closely base their practices on the Catholic Church, observe a penitential season that includes fasting and abstinence from meat on certain days.  The fast and abstinence practice, we should note, is considerably more rigid in the Eastern churches, both the Orthodox and the Catholic, than in the Western ones.  

That called this old post to mind, but it isn't what got it rolling.

Sometimes a person cannot help but be amused.

Meatless Monday is global movement with a simple message: once a week, cut the meat. Launched in 2003, Meatless Monday is a non-profit initiative of The Monday Campaigns, working in collaboration with the Center for a Livable Future (CLF) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

That's what brought this post to mind.

Meatless Monday.

 

 Meatless Days, Wheatless Days, and Porkless Days (and Heatless Days) all became a feature of civilian life during World War One, in an effort to conserve food resources.  True to form, the government didn't put the Meatless Days on Friday, which means that Catholics and the Orthodox got all these days plus the existing Friday one they already had.

Frankly, I'm not hugely impressed with the various "meatless" movements and to a certain degree I think they reflect the increasingly effete and disconnected nature of Western Society.  There's a real fear of nature anymore in our highly urban-centric world which has lead to people being afraid of their own shadows, including their food, and a weird sort of belief that if only they do this or that, or avoid this or that, they'll live forever.  They won't.

Part of that, in very real terms, is that people have so lost a sense of the Divine, and a spiritual life, that they don't know what it is. They grasp for it, and oddly, and amusingly to some of us in the Apostolic faiths, they eventually grasp and grope their way around to something they think is new, but which is ancient. But in grasping on it ,they don't really get the point.

Let's start with Meatless days.

Usually you'd hear something like we live in an era when meat is more common on the plate than every before, but that's not really universally true.  Some cultures in some parts of the world have always had very large quantities of meat in the overall percentage of their diets. Some less so. All have had meat in their diets, contrary to some erroneous beliefs.

In Western societies abstaining from meats, as a form of penance and religious observance, was at one time the absolute norm.  So Meatless Days aren't a concept that the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health thought up by a long shot.  All Catholics at one time abstained from meat, which was not defined to include fish, from some point a very long time ago up until, in some countries, but not all, after Vatican II.  It was a universal Catholic practice and even bad Catholics observed it.

 

 The government during World War One didn't consider fish a meat either, so while secularist today will sometimes scoff at the Catholic exception for fish, society at large has always had this view itself.

Catholics still observe it during Lent, and the fact that 22% of Americans are Catholics shows this time of year as all the fast food joints suddenly start serving fish sandwiches.  A lot of them do this only during Lent, although they never specifically note that's why they're doing it.  Some traditionalist Catholics in North America still do this on every Friday of the year as they simply kept on after the United States Council of Catholic Bishops changed the rule for the United States.  At that time, Catholics were still supposed to do something else penitential, which is widely ignored and which, frankly, if they'd been thinking would been something that they'd know would have been widely ignored.  "Spirit of Vatican II".  Hmph.

And as noted the Orthodox their own rules, as do the Eastern Rites of the Catholic Church, which include much  more strict abstinence rules.   Over Lent, or Great Lent as they call it, they step out the abstinence rules so that, over time, they give up fats, oils and alcohol.  By the end of Lent their diet restrictions are, therefore, pretty significant.  I'm not sure what the various branches of the Eastern churches do otherwise, but at least at one time their abstinence periods were fairly significant.

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Salt Lake City.  There are enough members of this church in Salt Lake to support a respected elementary school.

That this is a Catholic thing I think implicitly shows as while the Catholic Church is the largest church in the United States, a majority of Americans are not Catholics, and so the old Protestant prejudice shows in avoiding putting the Meatless Days on our Day of Abstinence, Friday.  Even if we throw in the few percentage of Orthodox in the mix (the Orthodox are only a significant religious demographic geographically in some locations in the US) we're still only a quarter of the overall population.  So 75% or so of Americans aren't Catholics.  Having said that, probably at least another 10% follow Catholic customs to some degree, and we have to note that both Jewish and Muslim Americans also have some dietary laws that are seasonally unique.  Anyhow, so when John Hopkins discovers what it thinks is this nifty secular penitent practice, it puts it on Monday, not on Friday.

Wouldn't want to be too Catholic there, is apparently the thought.

This is amusing enough, but recently people have been discovering intermittent fasting.

I'm not a dietician and I'm not going to make any recommendations let alone opine on the safety of anything for anyone, but intermittent fasting is something that's recently made an appearance here and there.  Indeed, hardcore fasting has in some places.  Again, it's interesting to see a secular and somewhat left wing fad come riding in on the unacknowledged path long trod by various religions, including the very ones that such people spend so much time pretending they are avoiding.

Fasting can mean more than one thing to more than one person, but basically in this context it means abstaining from food for a discernible period.  In the Catholic and Orthodox faiths it means, on days of fast, to abstain from food save for one meal.  As I'm not closely familiar with the Eastern practice I'll only note that in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church what that means is to take one primary meal and you can take two minor ones to sustain yourself during the day. . . not much of a fast really.  Some people will take that further and omit a meal.  Or some will take it further yet and only eat the primary meal. This is what in secular terms is intermittent fasting.

There are faiths that go further than this, we should note.  Muslims during Ramadan eat only after dark and not at all during the day.

It's weird to read about intermittent fasting from secular sources as they'll go on and praise things like clarity of mind, or weight loss, and the like.  But at the end of the day, there's always some perceived spiritual nature of it from people who are desperately trying to avoid being spiritual.

Indeed, it's interesting how all of this works.  In this very secular age in which so many people are lost and struggling for a center, and in which the social left is constantly thinking it comes up with something new and brilliant, what they've come up with recently is the unacknowledged rediscovery of Fasting and periodic Abstinence of the Catholic type, let alone, at the same time, a rediscovery that more and more a lot of the old rules about personal conduct that they liberated us from starting in the 1960s were really good ideas in the first place.

But then, they're not going to admit that, or give credit perhaps where credit should be given.

Oh well.  Have a good and productive Lent. . . no matter how you approach it.

Fast on Fridays to Meatless Mondays. Bemused observations

One of the things that really sets a Catholic or an Orthodox person in the United States apart from other people is that during Lent, they fast and they abstain from mean on Fridays. The disciplines for those whose catholic faith is of the Eastern branch as opposed to the Latin branch isn't exactly the same, but that this occurs is a feature of their lives for forty days running up to Lent and always has been.

Days of abstention poster from World War One.  During the war, Monday was "meatless", and Saturday Porkless, although at least one U.S. government website states it was "wheatless Mondays, meatless Tuesdays, porkless Saturdays".  Any way you look at it, for Catholics of the period all Fridays were already meatless.

This, however, is actually a change in the United States for Roman Catholics from the old rules.  While we now abstain from meat on Fridays and on Ash Wednesday, during Lent, at one time all Roman Catholics abstained from meat every Friday throughout the year.  Indeed, in many places this is still the binding discipline.  In the US it was lifted following Vatican Two with the understanding that each Catholic was to observe some sort of penitential observance personal to them, but at least according to Jimmy Akin, who knows such things much better than I, it isn't clear that this was made a binding obligation so the widespread ignoring of this by American Catholics may not actually be an instance of their ignoring their faith.

The Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholics, it should be noted, traditionally have much more strict fasting rules in modern times.   This is apparently something that's been relaxed, in some instances in the United States, taking into account the culture here, but traditionally the Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholics observed two Lenten season during the year, one prior to Easter and another prior to Christmas, both of which have very strict rules which require the faithful to abstain not only from meat, but also ultimately from dairy and wine.

The entire discipline has always been widely misunderstood by those who aren't Catholic or Orthodox and indeed its one of the distinct things about Catholics and Orthodox that not only set them apart, but made them seem strange to Protestants (but probably not to Jews or Muslims who have their own dietary laws).  "Where in the Bible does it say you have to do that?" is a question that probably every Catholic or Orthodox is asked at one time in his life, simply for not ordering a hamburger at lunch.  Well, as well catechized Catholics or Orthodox know, the it doesn't say that you can't eat meat on Fridays in the Bible and the Bible doesn't set the Lenten periods either.  These aren't law with a Divine origin, like the Jewish dietary laws, but rather matters of discipline set by the Church, and set by the Church in very early times in recognition of the spiritual and even the temporal advantages of abstaining and fasting.

Which makes it all the more amusing for us to watch the secular world come up with this anew.  After all, both the Catholics and the Orthodox can point to the Council of Nicea establishing Lent and its practices in the year 325.

Hence, the amusing Meatless Mondays.

Meatless Mondays is one of those uniquely American movements which, I'd argue, has its roots in the Puritan foundation of the country. The Puritans are widely misunderstood, but one thing about them is that they were die-hard Calvinists who approved of work and disapproved of nearly anything about average life that was fun or enjoyable except, oddly enough, husbands and wives getting frisky with each other.  We don't think of them that latter way, but that's about the only thing I'm aware of, off hand, that they really strongly approved of outside of their own Calvinistic interpretation of the Bible.  They tended to ban just about darned near anything else that was out there, including sports and the celebration of Christmas.

Now, the Puritans were not teetotalers (the drank a fair amount of beer) and they certainly didn't have any dietary restrictions they imposed on anyone, but their way of looking at things in regards to its enjoyment or not has had a lasting impact on American culture, as well as a few others.  One strong feature of it is that Americans have developed sort of a fondness for deprivation and self suffering which stands apart from a lot of other cultures.  Indeed, Catholic (and Orthodox) southern Europe has traditionally tended to drive Americans crazy in certain respects as its attitude towards work, food, and alcohol has tended to be quite a bit different from our own, even though we're all basically Europeans.  That is, in the very cultures which retain the Old Faith, and hence the various rules discussed above, the happy people otherwise go around enjoying all the things that the latest in worrywart Americans urge everyone to give up all the time.  That is, these cultures, some of which are notoriously long lived, indulge in the things that secular American dietary theorist would require you to give up. So, oddly, that secularized focus would impose a perpetual fast on everyone.

Now all that may seem odd for a thread that starts off about the Lenten practices of Catholics and the Orthodox, the latter of which take the concept of Lenten fasting far further than Catholics do.  But I'd maintain that this is all closely tied together.

Anyhow, Meatless Mondays dates back to a World War One government backed program which was intended to help conserve food for the troops.  Every week had a meatless day (which like the Catholic and Orthodox Friday didn't mean fish, that wasn't meat), a wheatless day, and a porkless day.  I will confess I find the porkless day a bit odd, as pork is meat, but maybe the meatless day was simply beef free.

Now, while this movement was legitimately tied to the war effort, as resources were so scarce, I can't help but note a subtle Puritan element to it.  The concept has a certain suffering aspect to it, and tied in the whole culture to suffering for a cause.  Well, not the whole culture equally.  Catholics and Orthodox already had a meatless day and indeed the Orthodox had two meatless seasons.  It can't help but be noted that the Wilson Administration didn't propose making Fridays, which were already meatless for a big chunk, albeit a minority, of the population, meatless (including pork).  No, Catholics and Orthodox, if they observed Meatless Tuesday (as that was the day it was set on, not Monday) and Porkless Saturday (as that's the day that was set on) still had the added porkless and meatless Fridays.

In other words, World War One got to be extra bland for Catholics and Orthodox Americans.  It isn't as if the government couldn't have made Fridays meatless and porkless.  But they didn't.

And now we have this movement carried forward to modern times, but this time based on the concept that by taking meat out of your diet, you'll live forever.  You'll be eating bland, but you'll get to eat bland until dementia or infirmity take you down.  Interesting.

It seems as if the Puritanized American secular culture interestingly cast about for a way to reintroduce the Catholic fasts that it tossed out with the Reformation, but in doing so, it always puts on a ting of odd guilt about it that the Catholics and Orthodox largely omit.  Its interesting. And its really carried over into secular lives and not so much into modern American Protestantism, although some Protestant denominations do abstain from alcohol, and two of the American faiths do have distinct dietary laws in their own rights.  Secular American culture, however, looks for a lot of ways to suffer, and something to tie that suffering too.

It'd be an interesting cultural study, but I think there's something to be argued to the effect that the Reformation's tossing out of Catholic fasting rules had the effect, ultimately, of not only putting the Reformation cultures in the position of allowing everyone to make up their own rules, after a long period of development, but there is something really deeply missed about those rules.  The Puritan impulse to make rules really strict is strongly retained in our culture, even if the Calvinist impulse to base them on religious tenants is not.  Or maybe it is.  Many modern Americans seemingly elevate dietary beliefs to near religious status.

There are a lot of observations that could be made about all of this, but maybe one is that there's something about human beings that require periods of self sacrifice for some reason.  A person could argue this in a number of ways. If a person stated a theological argument they might be able to say that there's something ingrained in our natures by our Creator that causes us to need to engage in periodic periods of fast in order to focus us to things greater.

And that's the oddity of the Great Secular Fast that Puritanical American dietary folks would impose.  It seems largely focused on nothing.  But there's some impulse there that, if only I suffer more, or give up this or that, and reduce myself to a diet of free trade, organic, Slovenian, oatmeal, I'll be happy.  Probably not.

Alaska halibut, being fried in butter, on a Lenten Friday.

At least that doesn't seem to be the lesson learned from those Southern European cultures where the old rules apply, but when their not in effect, the people seem pretty content with their traditional diets, and they seem to live a long time.