Today is Ash Wednesday, that point in the Christian liturgical year that begins the season of Lent. The word “Lent” comes from the Middle English lente or “springtime,” which in turn derives from the Old English lencten and has to do with the lengthening of the days. This I learned as an adult. As a Catholic schoolgirl I thought “Lent” came from the Latin word for “slower” because it was the time when festivities were curtailed and somber thoughts were prescribed, thus making you slow down spiritually. 

Lent always begins in the end of winter. It is meant to afford six weeks of spiritual
housecleaning and renewal leading up to Easter Sunday, the date of which is arrived at by a complicated calculation keyed to the appearance of the first full moon in spring. This year Easter is as late as I have ever known it to be -- April 23.

Today’s designation means that yesterday was, depending on your tradition,  Mardi Gras (or, in loose translation, “Great Tuesday”), or “Fastnacht Day.” Both concepts are sometimes combined to arrive at "Fat Tuesday." It was also just plain March 7 if the Christian calendar and its secular translations are not part of your world view. But around here, at the western edge of deep Pennsylvania Dutch country, it’s hard to escape the influence of the practice of using up animal fat in preparation for more than a month of largely meatless meals.

Last year Great Tuesday was February 16, and I wrote about it in this space the next day. This piece has been indexed by many search engines for “Fastnacht Day,” and a check of my access log this morning showed that the page was called up fifteen times. I found it curious that there were so many people who would go to the Internet to find out about Fastnacht Day. But I’m coming to understand that even a lot of people whose background is nominally Christian and who have grown up around here, where providing doughnuts on Fat Tuesday is a major fund-raiser for churches and school bands, haven’t had these notions impressed upon them the way they were on me.

Last night I was driving home from a meeting just as the oldies station I favor was
beginning the 9:00 theme set. The deejay said all the songs would be keyed to the idea of “super” for “Super Tuesday” because he couldn’t find five songs about doughnuts. He confessed to being a little bewildered about this area’s obsession with this food -- he’d grown up in the midwest, he said, where they didn’t have “Fastnacht Day.” He said he wasn’t even sure why doughnuts were the deal for this day -- something about using up all the fat and sugar in preparation for “the lentil season.”

I laughed out loud -- “The Lentil Season!” Had I heard him wrong? Was he making a joke? Or had he indeed grown up culturally impoverished, knowing neither Fat Tuesday nor Lent?

And then I thought about it -- how thankful I sometimes forget to be for the rich cultural and spiritual heritage that is mine, and how “the lentil season” is not so far off as a description of a time when the comfortable and the accustomed in foodways and in spiritual practice are set aside, and we are called to examine our hearts to see where change is needed.

I know I need change -- I used to write about the ways of eating and the ways of prayer in these pages, and I let both those things go. I think over these next weeks I’ll be dusting off those areas, sprucing them up, seeing what attention to intention in those areas can do to contribute to my growth.

I guess it could probably be assumed that anyone who would put out an on-line journal, a collection of one's thoughts, opinions, writings, etc., would have to have a big or a healthy ego.
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