Celebrate while love is in the air – then Lent can begin
MANY moons ago, when I was living in London, we had a parish priest called Fr Pat, a by-thegood-book man from Donegal whose favourite thing was to lament the fripperies of the modern world to his congregation. On the Sunday before Ash Wednesday one year, he reminded us that the coming holy day required fasting and abstaining from eating meat. ‘And that doesn’t mean salmon,’ he clarified.
I wonder what poor Fr Pat would make of all the two-for-one Valentine’s Day meal deals – with their lobster starters and marquee steak main courses – being offered by Irish supermarkets this week. It’s scarcely the fault of either Church or commerce that two of the most significant dates in spring happen to coincide this year – a rare enough clash that only happens a couple of times a century.
Though the two events shared a calendar date in 2018, you have to go all the way back to 1945 to find the previous diary clash – when, presumably, people had bigger things on their mind besides meal deals.
But here we are. On Monday, the annual blessing of engaged couples in front of the shrine of St Valentine in Whitefriars Street church, Dublin, was moved forward by two days to avoid the clash with Ash Wednesday.
Speaking at the event, Bishop Denis Nulty reminded Catholics that Ash Wednesday takes priority over St Valentine’s Day and that even if they are drowning in hearts and flowers today, they should still fast and make penance.
Another priest, writing in a Catholic newspaper about the pesky fixture clash, manfully suggested the doing penance and fasting with your other half is an actual act of love to them. To which the hugely tempting response is to say, good luck with that.
So, is it possible to honour both days without losing the meaning of one? In other words, is there ever such a thing as a sexy collation? One suggestion from Bishop Nulty (which strikes me as more reasonable than the ‘starve together to celebrate your love’ hack) is for couples to move their Valentine’s Day to the day before (too late) or after, or to wait till the weekend to go out for a romantic meal.
At the risk of playing devil’s advocate, the trouble with that compromise is, tomorrow and the next 40 days are all in Lent, and the chances of getting a two-for-one meal deal in Marks and Spencer with lobster and steak for 20 quid after that are really remote.
Another solution – however much Fr Pat might rain down from heaven on you – is to have the salmon. Before half the world was vegetarian, eschewing chewing meat on Ash Wednesday and Fish Friday was a huge deal. When I was growing up, my parents approached those two sainted days with the same seriousness as a war room preparing a military manoeuvre, and my Dad always had two rashers for his breakfast the following morning, just in case.
Now though, most of us will have plenty of days on which we don’t eat meat and don’t even notice – so, in theory, adhering to that rule shouldn’t spoil any party. If you want to comply with the small meal and two collations rule, you might want to get your collations out of the way in the morning – to give you a good run at the day – and then divide your meal for two into two so that it becomes a meal for one eaten by two and you get to have the other half at the weekend.
Throw a bit of ash on your forehead while eating your meat-free, meagre mains and you’ll already be more than halfway into the Good Books.
After dinner, it’s worth remembering that while Valentine might be the patron saint of how’s-your-father, Ash Wednesday is a hair-shirt sort of a day so sexy underwear fashioned from any softer fabric is best avoided.
I assume – though I don’t claim to speak for the Curia here – that tomfoolery is permitted on Ash Wednesday but only for married people and must conform to traditional Irish practice of curtains and eyes closed. There is another way. The Church might insist that Ash Wednesday is the more important of the two events, but a walk around any shopping street this week would suggest the alternative. In a world and a life that’s already hard enough, would a benign, loving God really object if people celebrated love and happiness today and shifted penance and fasting to another day?
After all, even if they don’t carry the branding or the black mark, surely we all have enough Ash Wednesdays in our lives. If you’re lucky enough to have it, can a little bit of love today really be such a bad thing?