Writer's Diary #4
Shrove Tuesday, book rec, and divine encounter
This Writer’s Diary is coming to you a bit late in the day, and a little later than planned. Last week was rough at work, and I had a bunch of things to take care of which meant I had to push this post back a week to focus on other matters. Today was also busy, so I had to push back the post to later in the day. Better late than never, I guess.
Anyhow…blessed Shrove Tuesday! (Sort of?)
At this point in the year the Orthodox Church starts getting out of sync with Catholics and Protestants. While Lent is just a day away in the Western (Catholic) calendar, Orthodox still have a handful of weeks before Lent begins. This is because the ever-changing date of Easter (which is what we call a ‘movable feast’) is calculated differently by the Eastern and Western churches. Some years the formula gives East and West very similar dates (like last year when they were one week apart), and some years they even give us the same date (like next year). However, there are years (like 2024) when the dates are…quite…different. Five weeks to be exact.
So, while Catholics and Protestants are soon to enter that light-bearing darkness of the Lenten pilgrimage, we Orthodox will be a few steps behind.
I encourage any of you Western Christians, Catholics and Protestants alike, to find an Ash Wednesday service to attend tomorrow. And prayerfully take up the ascetic disciplines of fasting, increased prayer, and giving (to the poor) — how and to what extent? Well, that’s between you, the Lord, and your priest (or spiritual mentor/father/mother).
Regardless, whether your Lenten journey begins now or in five weeks, may it be a blessed season that prepares your soul for the glory of Christ’s resurrection.
From the Church Calendar
Tuesday after the VI Sunday after Epiphany Shrove Tuesday a.k.a. Mardi Gras (Western Catholic Calendar) 2024 A.D.
Shrove/Fat Tuesday belongs exclusively to the Western calendar and immediately precedes the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday (a holy day also specific to the West).
“Shrove” is a term which we no longer use commonly but which refers to a priest’s hearing and absolving of a Christian’s sin in the sacrament of Penance. Why is the term applied to the day before Lent? Because it is traditionally a day on which one would go to confession in order to begin the Lenten season properly: overshadowed by divine grace through repentance and restoration.
You might be more familiar with an alternative name for today: Mardi Gras (which is French for Fat Tuesday). Mardi Gras, however, is popularly associated with things quite contrary to the spirit of Lent: parties, gluttony, and lots of alcohol (I guess it sounds like any hol(y)day hijacked by modern, secular, materialistic American consumerism, right?). Anyhow, the name “Fat Tuesday” refers to rich, fatty foods that one would’ve consumed prior to beginning the great Lenten fast.
A fatty feast before a fast is hardly problematic; if anything it seems like quite an appropriate disposition for eating and drinking. Indeed, let us eat, drink, and be merry! — but with minds soberly set on death, darkness, and the vanity of all things.
When you sit down to eat with a ruler, observe carefully what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you are given to appetite. Do not desire his delicacies, for they are deceptive food. Proverbs 23:1-3
From My Reading
One of my favorite Substack writers, Rob Henderson, has a memoir coming out soon. You can read about the book and find the pre-order link if you follow go to the following page on his Substack: Troubled, by Rob Henderson (link).
There’s enough on the page to explain and hype-up the (awesome) book, so I’ll keep my thoughts short: It’d be well worth your time to read.
Whenever I have the 30-ish bucks to spare I’m planning on purchasing a copy for myself!
Some Thoughts & Stories
Irony: A student asks me if we can watch Fahrenheit 451 instead of reading it because he thinks it’d be more engaging (aka fun/easier) than reading the book.
Hyperbole: I had one of the coolest conversations ever with my AP students about memory, the self, and virtue. Two students stayed after class to hear me talk more about the paradoxical downward ascent of salvation.
Analogy: Flowers can’t grow on flowers; they must grow in dirt. Pretty things can’t come from pretty things; the worthwhile, good things in life…they are born from the ugliness of life. We must get our hands dirty and live real lives if we want lives full of meaning, propose, and beauty.
Writing Updates
This weekend was a good poetry weekend. For the past month I’d been chewing and chewing and chewing on several ideas that I couldn’t quite get out onto paper, and they finally spilled out into words I could worthily deem fitting and beautiful (though hardly perfect…who could ever say that?).
That experience is so much a part of the writing endeavor — grasping with my pen for some un-containable otherness I see in the world and repeatedly failing to contain it. The longing to capture an encounter, a moment, a sight, etc. using the frailty of lowly words is agonizing, and that longing is as irresistible as it is impossible to satiate.
On days when I, at last, sense that I’ve done it — captured that undefinable otherness with a pen and some miserly words — I know I have encountered the divine. I am as sure of it as I am sure that the Sun will rise tomorrow.
For how else would Beauty appear on paper? I cannot catch it with my pen scratchings, so great and sacred that it is; I can only encounter beauty, and upon encountering it I am the one who is caught and seized. Those lowly words of mine written in smudged black pen are but tokens of grace, memorials of my pilgrimage, symbols of divine condescension left for me — like crumbs sprinkled around the table after a feast. They are a gift freely given, the fruit of undeserved encounter.
Closing Out
I’ve been encouraged lately by the life and wisdom of St. Moses the Black, one of the many holy Fathers of the Egyptian desert. God has used him as a light to direct me, and his holy but very real life continues to console me as I walk through my own vale of sorrows. Thanks be to God for the goodness of his saints. We are indeed surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses — and we’re all the better for it.
Blessed (soon-to-be) Lent to you Westerners. And to the rest: Let us nonetheless remember that from dust we have come, and to dust we shall return.
Lord, have mercy.