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.

Roasting Sardines: A Fishy Adventure

I have taken a plunge into unknown waters. I have roasted sardines!

These are not sardines out of a can, much as I enjoy those. These are sardines that came frozen in a bag from Price-Rite.

Yikes, they have eyes! Once I encountered a fish with eyes in Toronto, at Honest Ed's. I am afraid I threw the eye across the room. That is a story for another day. My friends were kidding me about it just yesterday, how about that? 

What about Fish Eye wine?

I actually find that brand rather off-putting!

It is difficult to find any recipes involving sardines because the world being dumb, most people are put off by them. They do not like the name or something, who knows. 

The same can be said for anchovies. I order Caesar salads a lot when I am out, and 100 percent of the time now, they arrive without anchovies. Nobody even asks you if you want them. You have to remember to ask and then they look at you as if you are crazy.

Back to my sardine adventure. I think I just arranged them on a baking sheet with garlic and lemon. I put them in a neat row, packing them in like, well, like sardines. I roasted them at 400 degrees for something like 10 minutes.

These are humble little fish and I figured they would be ideal for Lent. I think when Christ multiplied the loaves and the fishes, the fishes must have looked something like these sardines.

They did look mighty pretty on the plate. Eyes and all. I am sorry, sometimes you just have to serve the whole fish.

 That is the rewarding and artistic part of my story. However, I have to say my experiment was not a success and I will not be roasting sardines again.

They tasted good. That was not the problem. It was just difficult to get a mouthful. There were too many bones and the bones were not soft and chewable as I had been led to understood they would be. 

In addition, when you subtracted the head and the tail, there was not a lot to eat. And there were parts of the fish which, when you bit into them, you would taste something bitter. I think these sardines should have been more prepped. When you shop at Price-Rite anything is possible.

It is good to explore options like sardines because in general the price of fish is through the roof. Even catfish is something like $8 a pound. That is unacceptable, I am sorry. I mean, why don't I just buy steak?

Something smells fishy! Oh, that reminds me of another big point.

These sardines, they really did smell fishy!

I am not squeamish in this department. I love cooking fish and that worry that it will make your house smell fishy, that has not been true in my long experience.

However these sardines smelled fishy. And the leftovers continued to smell fishy in the fridge.

The moral of the story: Some things are just better in the can.

Sardines are one!

 

 

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!

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!

The Shriven

Today it was back into the St. Michael's confession booth with me. Yes, I drew aside the midnight blue curtains, and in I went with my sinful self. Two funny things happened:

For one thing, the priest gave me this creative penance the likes of which I have not heard.

I was supposed to go home and take a piece of paper and list five things that brought me joy in the last year, and five people who brought me joy.

Then for every thing and person on that list I am supposed to say an Our Father, a Hail Mary and a Glory Be in thankfulness. Hmm, the Glory Be looks funny in print, you know? But it is a prayer that I love. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen! When you say that prayer you are saying a mouthful.

So that is one thing that was neat about going to confession today. Here is the other:

I only just now realized that it is Shrove Tuesday. I was thinking of today as Fat Tuesday, starting with this big breakfast I ate. But it is also called Shrove Tuesday. I had forgotten that.

And Shrove Tuesday, I never thought about what it meant. It means confession! As in "shriven." Speaking of which, I am putting that in the headline because I read online there is some kind of slasher film stupidly called "The Shriven." I want people Googling that film to find me instead. Hahahahaa!

Ahem. Anyway, in days of old, people would flock to confession on Shrove Tuesday so you would be shriven in time for Lent.

I was shriven on Shrove Tuesday! And here I was just figuring I would beat the rush. I guess that was thinking back then, too. There were about a dozen people in line for confession at St. Michael's and for a while I had to stand and wait. A fellow penitent passed the time by painting my picture.

Then they opened a new confessional, the way at Aldi when there is a lot of people they have to open a new aisle. I have to say this, there were a lot of hipsters. A lot of guys. A few of them looked as if they must belong to a band.

All of us celebrating Shrove Tuesday.

shrive

SHrīv/

verb

archaic

past participle: shriven

1. (of a priest) hear the confession of, assign penance to, and absolve (someone).

   • present oneself to a priest for confession, penance, and absolution.

Pie in the sky

This year for Lent I am trying to do what I did last year, which was, ahem, give up meat. It is not that big of a sacrifice for me because I like vegetarian cooking. It is more exciting than cooking meat in some ways because for the most part I think it is harder and more creative.

Except nothing could be harder than trying to get that steak right! Remember that? What a hassle that was. Eventually I gave up.

Anyway. Giving up meat isn't terrible but it is an inconvenience. To try to make things easier I have informal themes for the week. One week was sort of Italian week and another was Eating Well week, all the recipes came out of Eating Well. I am like Leonard Pennario, endlessly creative.

This week is Hippie Week. All the recipes are hippie food!

As my brother George said to me the first time we went to hear the Grateful Dead in California, Deadhead food is good food. And yesterday, I have to say, I was very happy when Howard came home and sniffed and said, "It smells good in this house."

It must have been the roasted beets. I had beets roasting and this other dish involving fish and escarole and mushrooms, from this old Moosewood Classics cookbook I just scored at Savers.
Today I went back to that book and it is Homespun Pot Pie.

It ended up taking, let us say, a little longer than the book said it would. Half way through I checked online and there were reviews praising the recipe but saying how much work it was.

One person wrote: "I made this for Christmas dinner."

For Christmas! That is the greatest. I love when someone is making something for Christmas and I am  making it for Monday night dinner. And we did enjoy it. Here is a picture of Howard eating the pot pie.

Oh, dear. I am afraid this Lent is not doing me a lot of spiritual good. Well, at least it is making me a good cook. Perhaps in Purgatory I will be able to shorten my time by putting in time in the kitchen. I can cook for the other poor souls in Purgatory.

I am going to have to be buried with my Savers cookbooks.

The poet and the nun

I have found this fascinating Lenten reading, as good as any novel. It is the account of Christ's Passion as seen through the fevered eyes of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, pictured at left.

You may read it free online. But I am warning you, it is hard to put down.

Blessed Catherine Emmerich was beatified by John Paul II but not on the strengths of these -- visions, were what you could call them. I think it is one of those situations where the Catholic Church leaves it up to you whether to believe they are from God. But her writings -- well, actually, someone else wrote them down for her, someone I will get to in a second -- they are a marvelous read, if nothing else.

Reading them made me wonder: How come we hear everything about St. Faustina but nothing about Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich? This stuff is amazing. She was this peasant nun without any money or formal education but she goes into all this historic detail. I read somewhere today that Mel Gibson made extensive use of her visions in "The Passion of the Christ."

Here is what reeled me in. As the music critic for The Buffalo News and the authorized biographer of Leonard Pennario I am big into music. And the man who wrote these visions down, he was the German poet Clemens Brentano. I had never heard of any of this but I sure knew that name. I know him, and I know his family.

"I know him, and I know his family." There is an endorsement!

Clemens Brentano was one of the most famous poets of the Romantic age, a rival to Goethe. He was one of the two poets we can thank for "Des Knaben Wunderhorn," the famous collection of German folk poetry that inspired a lot of artists including Gustav Mahler. He wrote poetry that was set to music by Richard Strauss. His sister was Bettina Brentano ...

... who had a flirtation with Goethe and, sort of, with Beethoven. His sister-in-law was Antonie Brentano ...

...  who was supposedly Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved," the woman to whom Beethoven addressed those torchy love letters. Ha, ha! I love the small size of that picture. I am going to leave it be. Clemens Brentano was the one who wrote that classic observation about the fragile Antonie: "Toni is like a glass of water that has been left standing for a long time."

This is all getting kind of inside baseball. Maybe I will go into it more on my Music Critic web log. My point is, you would think I would have run across this business about Clemens Brentano ...

... taking down the visions of this nun. But for some reason it is just not talked about very much.

"Well, Mary, everyone knows that Clemens Brentano took down the dictation of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich." Fine, all I am saying is you would think I would have heard of this somewhere, somehow, and yet I did not.

It is fascinating stuff.

To be explored at length, of an evening in Lent.

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!

My extraordinary life

I almost hate to admit this but when I went to church yesterday it was still Christmas.

All the decorations were still up! And we sang "The First Noel." On Jan. 11! How great is that? We also sang "Puer Natus Est." It is becoming one of my favorite chants.

And "Corde Natus Ex Parentis," at Communion. What a beautiful melody that is. It is a very old Christmas melody going back to before the Middle Ages.



And at the end of Mass when you are allowed to sing in English that is when we did "The First Noel."

The church still shone with crimson and gold. The creche, pictured above, was still up. It felt as if we were getting away with something. I hear that in all the rest of the Catholic Church, the people who do not do the Tridentine Mass, it is back as of today to Ordinary Time. Green vestments, nothing to see here, move along.

Our Mass in Latin is also known as the Mass in the Extraordinary Form. Dignum et justum est! That means "It is right and just." Because we have no Ordinary Time. As one of my friends at church said, "No time is ordinary."

All of it is extraordinary. The Christmas Cycle lasts until Lent. This is where we pay the piper: Lent for us begins three weeks earlier than for our brethren in Ordinary Time. That is not fun, I must admit. It was confusing to me when I first got into going to the Latin Mass and I remember asking Leonard Pennario about it, and he explained things to me. We start Lent with Septuagesima Sunday, which I believe is two and a half weeks ahead of Ash Wednesday.

Well, it is worth it, being able to extend the magic of the season as we do. I feel sorry for all the garden-variety Catholics stuck back in Ordinary Time.

I am going to celebrate my extraordinary life.

Perhaps I will make some Bailey's.

It might as well be spring

I was just looking again at that weird sun yesterday. It looked like an eclipse!

Helped along by the smoke from that smokestack at the fire station.

With all that excitement I forgot this news flash: Not to disappoint people but I finally took down my Christmas tree. Sunday was, ahem, Septuagesima Sunday, which heralds the dawn of Lent. In the Traditional Calendar it is as if we start Lent early. Thanks a heap, Traditional Calendar! Although last year it began a lot earlier than this year. Last year Septuagesima Sunday fell on Mozart's birthday.

The way it works is Septuagesima means 70 days, then Sexagesima, 60 days, then Quinquegesima, 50 days. Then  you hit Ash Wednesday at the 40-day mark and bang, you are into Lent.

These are approximate numbers of course. But you get the idea. Thinking of all this brings back my time in California with Leonard. I was new to the Latin traditional Mass and Pennario and I used to discuss it and he used to explain things to me sometimes. And yes, we giggled about Sexagesima Sunday. How can you not?

"Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa," Pennario used to say, with that smile of his.

If you are new to Latin that means, "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault." It is part of the Public Confession you make of all your sins. See all the drama you miss not going to the traditional Mass. It is far more poetic and thrilling.

Anyway there is your trip down the Latin memory lane! Now the tree is packed away -- carelessly, I might have to go and re-pack it, but still. The space is cleared, and the sunlight is pouring in. I love winter and I hate to see it go. But from now on, as far as I am concerned, it is spring. It is early spring.

It is time to start checking for the daffodils!

Sunday surprise

Yikes, today -- besides being Mozart's birthday -- is Septuagesima Sunday. That means we are in the pre-Lenten season! Which, Mozart would have known that. But me, I did not.

Above is a picture of me leaving St. Anthony of Padua Church weighed down by the awareness that Lent is upon us. Last year, Septuagesima Sunday also sneaked up on me.

I remember I first heard of Septuagesima Sunday when I was in California with Pennario. I was going to my first Tridentine Masses and a lot was new to me. Septuagesima means you are counting down until Easter. It means that there are 70 days, more or less, until Easter. Leonard helped explain that to me.

I guess this is God telling me to take down my Christmas tree.

On the bright side ... I am sure the word Lent is related to Lenz, which is archaic German for spring. So as of now we can think spring, should we so desire. I do not always desire. Just yesterday I was thinking I love the flavors of winter: cinnamon and cloves and cranberries. Plus I have pumpkins still to eat.

Were I to want spring, though, I would be cheered by signs I have been noticing. The daffodils have been up for weeks! In a holding pattern, but up.

Just this morning I found myself listening for the call of the chickadee, just in case. I did not hear the chickadee. But I will hear it any day now.

Meanwhile I did hear the other sound of spring ... the guy from the nearby group home, carrying on.

That is a sure sign of spring!

Like it or not.