A Medieval Ash Wednesday

Howard and I put off our Valentine's Day celebration until next week. And so today I turned my attention to Ash Wednesday. There was no getting out of it, you know?

And already I can say: It is going to be one of those Lents.

Our 6 p.m. Ash Wednesday Mass was a Low Mass -- that is, long, silent, and mysterious to anyone who has not attended one before. A friend I have gotten to know at the St. Louis choir was thinking she might go to this Mass and so I made sure I was there. I had told her she could join us in the choir loft. Choir reciprocity! And if we sang a chant she knew, she could sing with us.

La la la la la la la.

What happened was, she did join us up in the choir loft. However. 

She lasted 10 minutes!

OK, 20 minutes. Or a half an hour. However long it took for the ashes to be distributed. It is funny, I am accustomed to the Latin Mass. We do not have Eucharistic Ministers or any lay people who distribute the ashes. We have nothing like that. There is a priest -- sometimes two, however in this case we had one. And there is a crowd. The church was full today. It can take quite a while.

And I am kind of oblivious to it. It is like my sister Margie, living in New Jersey, has come to expect traffic jams. She visits Buffalo and hits a bit of a backup on the 190, no big deal for her. She just keeps talking, whatever. Whereas I, living in Buffalo, am all mad. What is this, I am saying. No one on the radio warned us about this. What is this backup?

A modern Mass goer is like me in this situation. What is this? Why is the line for ashes a mile long?

Why is the Mass two hours long?

It just not is something a normal person can deal with. OK, the Mass was not two hours long today. However if Jake, the choir leader, had not been sick, it would have been. Not that I would have noticed. You sing a lot through a normal Mass. It flies by like a freight train.

As it was today, we had a Low Mass and it was a little over an hour. However those ashes, they took a while.And it was too much for my St. Louis friend, I am afraid.

Here is a snapshot someone took of us finally receiving our ashes.

After which she fled into the night. And I do not blame her. Heck, she must have been thinking. What have I gotten into?

Next time anyone mentions wanting to come to our Latin Mass I will know better.

Instead of being all welcoming, I am going to say, "You know what? Don't."

And if the person persists, I will say, "OK, but be warned, we are on 12th century time."

Ash Wednesday Meets Valentine's Day

This week brings what for me is the most dreaded day of the year. Ash Wednesday!

And it is this Wednesday. And it is on St. Valentine's Day.

This has happened before in recent memory, Ash Wednesday landing on the Feast of St. Valentine. It happened in 2018. I remember because I had to do a story on it for The Buffalo News.

Before that, it had not happened for 73 years! The year 1945 was the last time. If you were a kid then, you could live out your whole life happily without having to deal with this Ash Wednesday/Valentine's Day situation. Now here I am having to deal with it twice.

What did I do in 2018? This is why everyone should keep a Web log. It turns out that Howard and I celebrated the day afterward, on Thursday.  I had completely forgotten that!

However now I went and joined the St. Louis choir and I have a rehearsal on Thursday. So that will not work. Who knows. We will do something. Technically we could have that traditional lobster on Ash Wednesday. It is not meat. However... There just is that Ash Wednesday feeling. Perhaps we will celebrate a week later.

On the bright side, I am going to go sing at the Latin Mass. This is one plus anyway: I get to sing, and I do not know what it is these days, all I want to do is sing. I am singing in these two choirs every Sunday and that is not enough. I need holy days too!

Continuing to look on the bright side, Lent is early this year and that is a good thing. We can start the countdown to Easter early. Easter is the earliest I ever remember it being. March 31. Not even April!

In 2018, Easter was April 1. However this year is a leap year so it is a day earlier. Once we get into March Easter will seem near. Lent does not seem that long.

It is funny and interesting that this year, when Easter is early, we also appear to be having an early spring. El Nino brought a mild winter and aside from one nasty storm, we have had it easy. There are rumors I hear that we will be getting more snow, however I have been checking the forecasts and I do not see it.

 As I love to remind myself, "Lent" means "Spring." It comes from "Lenz" in old German. 

And this year I think we can take it literally.

All of a Sudden, Lent

 I dread Lent. For years when I was a kind of cafeteria Catholic I did not think about it much, but now that I am in a traditional congregation, Lent looms large.

And today being Ash Wednesday, here it is!

The line for the confessional today before Mass, you should have seen it! And after Mass, too. It is hours later and I bet they are still there! 

Meanwhile there was all that beautiful and mournful Lenten music. At the end of Mass we sang the  "O Sacred Head Surrounded." That hymn always gets to me and afterward I was kneeling watching the crowded church empty (or more accurately get into the confession line). And one of my friends from the choir tapped me on the shoulder.

"Can I ask you a question?" she whispered. "The ashes, do you keep them on your face all day?"

I blinked. This is not a question you are used to. You just kind of grow up with this and you know what to do. Then I remembered that this one gal, she did not grow up Catholic.

"When do you wash them off?" she asked me.

I said, "Well, you usually keep them on all day, yes. You just wash them off when you wash your face at night." Then I thought about it. "Although I do not think it is a sin to wash them off. I just never thought about it."

Well, let me tell you this. I hope it is not a sin to wash them off. 

Because that is exactly what I did when I got home!

It was evening anyway, and wet snow was coming down, and I just got into the bathtub and took a hot bath and washed away those ashes. The Mass had been intense, as Ash Wednesday masses usually are, and I just felt it was time.

Not only that but my ashes this year looked really awful. They were like this charcoal blotch on my forehead. No cross, just this blotch. Having a cross on your forehead is one thing. Having just this blotch is another.

Hahaa.. I just found this chart.

Here I go making light of things however I got something between the Blob and the Hindu.

I understand that I have to be reminded that I am dust. However at least put a cross on my forehead, you know?

Oh, dear.

It is going to be one of those Lents!

The five people you meet on Ash Wednesday

This is a an uncompromising Ash Wednesday. As my brother George said it does not matter that it is the middle of March, it is the dead of winter.

I took that picture yesterday before my fingers froze and my phone died. 

Ash Wednesday stresses me out so much that I cannot be around people. Today instead of going to my usual church I went to St. Benedict's for my ashes. I have done that other years too. Every time I go there, I behold things that amaze me.

St. Benedict's as I have written before has a free-wheeling Ash Wednesday atmosphere. Laity distribute ashes. A girl welcomed me at the door with a bright smile and an invitation to check out their prayer resources, also there was a priest hearing confessions, and --

Suddenly the priest was at her elbow. "I was just going to say, I'm going on break," he said.

Ha, ha! He must have seen me approaching!

I went to get my ashes from this one lady who administered them simultaneously to me and to this big handsome guy my dad would have called "Mountain Man." We had to recite a psalm together.

All the while this girl was at the piano -- they have a piano at St. Ben's -- playing New Age music. That is the way this church is. It just is.

Now comes the greatest thing. After getting my ashes I was kneeling in the pew trying to pray the Rosary, which I try to do every day anyway. And right in the middle of a decade, which for the record was the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, this young man approaches me.

"Hi!" he called out, with a big smile, as if he knew me.

And I figured he did. Because I am terrible with names and I am always embarrassed about it. But luckily all I did was say "Hi!" in return, and smile back.

Then I realized he was doing that with everyone. He would call out "Hi!" or "Hey!" exactly as if he knew them! And sometimes he would say, "Welcome to St. Benedict's," sometimes not.

He was not this dweeb, either. He looked like a popular kind of party guy. I admired him for taking on this role so fearlessly. Then what happened was, the girl at the piano began singing from her distant corner. You could not really hear her so this guy began chiming in, helping out.

"Lord, be with me, I can't do this alone," was one lyric, I think. I can't really remember. I was too awestruck.

I have never seen anyone with such self-confidence! He was just sauntering around the church, doing his thing.

Next to him, we are all mere church mice!

Ashes for Valentine's Day

I must continue this Web log because the last post I had written was: "The Christmas Tree Quandary." And here it is, 60 degrees today!

Well, it was raining. We cannot get things right this early in the year. We cannot have warmth without rain. Still, it feels good.

And may I point out, that quandary did not last for long. Almost right after I wrote that post I went and took the tree down. I was not quite sure why. It was a very snowy day. But I must have felt something because that very evening, it began warming up, and the next day the snow began to melt. And I did a check for the daffodils and you know what? They were up!

I took a picture and that is it, at the top of this post. OK, so they will be only an inch high for a couple of months. Still.

Now I have no choice but to consider it spring. Lenz, to use the old word that gave us Lent. I got through Ash Wednesday even though it was the same day as St. Valentine's Day, an unfortunate coincidence I got to explore in the paper. We celebrated the good saint's day the Thursday after Valentine's Day. Howard took the picture at left. Look, that is a Cinnamon Pecan Swirl candle. Remember the snowy night I went out shopping for those? I will never forget that. It is a funny thing to remember, but I remember it.  "It crossed my mind that maybe I was dead." I remember that moment!

Meanwhile there was Ash Wednesday to deal with.

I got the mother lode of ashes on my forehead. I had a dentist appointment and I actually apologized for them.

"I'm sorry I am covered with these ashes," I said.

I mean, I had to say something! It was the elephant in the room. Here I was lying under these lights with all these ashes.

Clearly this is going to be one of these Lents. I know, I know, it is a holy time of year, a time of renewal, and still, I cannot handle Ash Wednesday, I just cannot. I lost five pounds out of stress and then gained them back out of stress.

The good news: Forward we go now into spring.

Next quandary: Gardening!

The Christmas tree quandary

I have a terrible confession: My Christmas tree -- pictured at left when it was still bright white -- is still up.

I keep promising myself I will take it down but then I do not.
Part of the problem is, it is still snowy outside. When it goes up into the 40s or something, then you can think spring, and that is the time to take down the tree. When you get into Lent, Lent means spring, and that is the time to take down the tree.

Not now!

Last week I went past some of the better houses, on Nottingham and streets like that, and some of them still had trees lit up outside. So I am not alone.

Still I feel a little funny plugging in the tree. I know it is time to take it down. We have passed Septuagesima Sunday and Sexagesima -- hee hee -- Sunday. Candlemas is past.

What is wrong with me?

It is not even a real tree. It does not have to go out on the curb or die a terrible death like the tree in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Fir Tree."

It simply goes into its box and is put away, in preparation for coming out in again in what, a few months?

Why can't I take down my tree?

Hahaha... I am laughing over all my old Christmas tree stories.

There was one year I went without. Unbelievable but true.

There was another year when it was the Fourth Sunday of Advent and I did not have a tree and rushed out to get one and wound up in Christmas tree stand emergency mode.

There was the year I put the tree up on Christmas Eve. I could not get to it before then!

Oh, look! There was one year I did not take the tree down till Ash Wednesday. And Ash Wednesday that year was March 9!!

That is what I will do this year. I will take the tree down on Ash Wednesday.

I must be strong!

Tap dancing in the confessional

I went to Ash Wednesday Mass at St. Michael's which as we have discussed before is the confessional capital of Buffalo.

Whenever you walk in they are holding confessions!

With which, I took advantage. It had been, ahem, a while since my last confession.

I got to the church about 10 minutes early and as I may have mentioned about St. Michael's, the atmosphere in there is kind of unusual. People get to Mass early and they stay late and if you walk in when no mass is going on, there will still be people in there, praying or meditating or whatever. It is always quiet, unlike a lot of other churches.

Another thing I do not think I have mentioned, they have a cool bell thing going on at St. Michael's. There is this kind of shimmer of bells that tells you when Mass is going to start, in about five minutes or so.

I heard that shimmer of bells and that was when it struck me that I should go to confession. And I went into the booth and knelt down. A kind gentleman in a nearby pew was nice enough to take a picture of me, visible up above at the top of this post. But it was not as easy as it looks.

The trouble was, I had not thought about it a great deal. This is how big a loser I can be, I did not have my confession planned out. I hastily got about three sins in my head and then in I went.

And I lost track of my sins in the middle of my confession!

I mentioned one or two things and then I blanked. What else had I done wrong? There had to be something.

Probably I should have said, "I'm sorry, Father, I forgot what else I was going to say." The priest was extremely nice and would have been fine with that. But instead I just kept talking. Tap dancing, in radio lingo. I have heard that when you are doing a radio show and no one is calling in, you have to tap dance, i.e., talk about nothing, just so the airwaves do not go dead.

Tap, tap, tap. "So anyway I was thinking I needed to work on that, and I have to prioritize my life better, and ..."

Telephone call for Mr. Astaire! Paging Mr. Astaire! Honest, I was like Fred Astaire. Or the Nicholas Brothers.

It was not as bad as the time I forgot my Act of Contrition but it was stressful all the same. I just kept tapping and tapping.

Finally I thought of something else I could say and I talked about that. Whew! What it was, I can't remember. Nor does it matter, now, because it has been forgiven.

These are the wages of getting up at 5:30 a.m. to deal with matters Pennario-related.

Your sins escape you!