When religion collides with love & silliness
Ash Wednesday and Easter make rare landing on Valentine’s and April Fools’ days
Church and state are about to collide on the calendar. Ash Wednesday, when Christians are smudged with a reminder of death, falls on gushy, lovey Valentine’s Day. And Easter, the most important Christian observance, lands on April Fools’ Day, when we need to be careful what to believe.
The two mashups have not happened together since 1945. Easter was most recently on April 1, or April Fools’ Day, in 1956, but Ash Wednesday did not fall on Valentine’s Day then because it was a leap year.
What any of this means for you depends on how closely you follow religious rules. Let’s start with Ash Wednesday, when Catholics are expected to abstain from meat, like the old every-Friday rule, and to fast, meaning refrain from eating big meals.
So if you take your sweetie out for a meaty feast, you’re probably doing it wrong. After all, there’s the separation of church and steak.
The Rev. Paul Hartmann, judicial vicar for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, doesn’t think the archbishop is going to intervene this time like he does to allow Catholics to eat corned beef on St. Patrick’s Day when it falls on a meatless Friday in Lent.
“There’s a higher emphasis given to fast and abstinence
on Ash Wednesday than on a relatively normative Friday during Lent,” he said, adding that he thinks many lovers will celebrate Valentine’s Day on the weekend before or after.
And, no, the ashes distributed at church this year won’t be red as a nod to Valentine’s Day, though it is named for a saint.
Valentine’s Day and April Fools’ Day always fall on Feb. 14 and April 1, respectively. Ash Wednesday and Easter move around a lot. Easter lands on the first Sunday after the first full moon occurring on or after the spring equinox. It’s always between March 22 and April 25. To pinpoint Ash
Wednesday, back up six weeks and four days from Easter.
Ash Wednesday was on Valentine’s Day in 1945, 1934 and 1923, but the last time before then was 1877.
Easter was on April 1 in 1956, 1945, 1934 and 1923, but before that you have to go back to 1888, a leap year.
We won’t have to wait too long before this all happens again in 2029.
There’s some push and pull at the intersection of Easter and April Fools, too. Some people think of April Fools’ Day as the atheist holiday, though that’s actually a hoax that caught on.
“Often we get a lot of nasty emails or contacts on April 1 because of the psalms’ ‘The fool says in his heart there is no God,’ ” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Madison-based Freedom from Religion Foundation.
She wasn’t aware of the Easter/April Fools confluence until I mentioned it. A cute coincidence, she called it.
“Every year I get people saying, hey, we should make April 1 Atheists Coming Out Day, but I’m really not sure that would translate correctly. I think every day should be Atheist or Agnostic Coming Out Day,” Gaylor said.
The calendar oddity could provide fodder for preachers’ sermons, Hartmann said.
“There’s the scripture passage, I think it’s Corinthians, that we’re fools for Christ in a sense that the world thinks us foolish for this belief in a resurrection,” he said.
If we can believe the numbers we see on the internet, 45% of adult Catholics receive ashes, and 54% of Americans celebrate Valentine’s Day. The number of people who definitely or probably play a trick on April Fools’ Day is 77%, which sounds high to me and will probably be lower this year because most of us are not at work or school on Sunday. And 80% of American adults celebrate Easter.
That includes the secular traditions like dyeing eggs and baskets of jelly beans.
One commenter I found on a Reddit chat already has a plan for an Easter trick: “I’ll tell my kids to hunt for eggs that I didn’t hide.”
Believers and atheists alike could agree that would be mean.
Contact Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or jstingl@jrn .com. Connect with my public page at Facebook .com/ Journalist. Jim. Stingl