Pancakes, Ash, and Chocolates
Sometimes the traditions and customs of the Christian Church can seem strange and hard to understand. I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the current season, and how it especially speaks to those who are going though a time of difficulty or loss.
On Tuesday last week households up and down the country had the joy of attempting to toss a pancake perfectly, seeing kitchen counters covered with flour and splashes of milk, and perhaps a few arguments over whether a French crepe really counted! This was Shrove Tuesday. Shrove is a good bit of ancient English, from the word Shrive, which means to pay a penance, or do something to earn forgiveness.
The following day was Ash Wednesday. You might have seen people with a black cross smudged on their forehead. This black oily mark was made from ashes of some crosses made of palm leaves that were used during a church service the previous year which were burnt with a little oil to create this oil. On Ash Wednesday, Lent begins.
Put simply, Lent is a season where people engage in fasting (going without something, or actively practicing doing good and being a positive influence) in preparation for Easter. Easter is a great celebration of life, joy, and hope, often involving chocolate, and other rich celebratory foods, and comes at the end of Holy Week, which I’ll cover in a future blog.
But for now, we’re in Lent, 40 days on which we remember the ways that we have failed, or the ways that life has been hard and difficult. It has echoes of Bible stories, such as the People of Israel wandering in the desert 40 years, or Jesus going alone into the desert to pray and fast for 40 dys before beginning his public ministry.
A season of remembering suffering and also remembering the ways we’ve caused suffering. All this so that when the season of celebration comes it might be entered into more completely.
In times of loss and pain it can feel like this is all there is. It can threaten to overwhelm us, it feels so much bigger than us. And just as Lent, which last for forty days, can seem unending for those voluntarily going without something meaningful to them, our mourning might seem unending too. In the time of our darkest hours it might seem very difficult to hear, as the ancient poem has it, “Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”
Nevertheless it is true. The pain is real. The loss is real. The tears are real. But this season will not last forever is also real.
We enter Lent, knowing that Easter is coming. In the season of mourning, it may be hard to believe that joy will ever come again. But if we pause and be still we might hear, what at first seems a distant whisper, of another truth, that one day this pain will not be as sharp, that the tears will fall less often, less freely, that our broken hearts might beat again.
Jonathan Somerville
12 Mar 2025
