Romance turns to penance in the space of a few days

Romance had no sooner made its annual appearance on Valentine’s Day than the wrath of penance descended upon us with the arrival of Ash Wednesday, when we should be all making our vows of sacrifice for the following six weeks.

Many of us of an older generation still get the ashes imprint on the first day of Lent but the motivation for embarking on monumental acts of penances, like giving up the drink, seems to be decreasing with each passing Spring.

It’s still though one of the few days of the year when us Catholics will abstain from meat and make some effort at sticking to the fasting gospel of surviving on one main meal and two collations (very light meals allowed on fast days).

Easter arrives early enough in our calendar this year, based on the old formula of Easter Sunday falling on the first Sunday that follows the first full moon after the Spring Equinox of March 21.

The beginning of Lent was certainly a far bigger deal back in the 1960s for any primary schoolchild in that we were all ‘encouraged’, well maybe that should be ‘expected’, to give up some source of material pleasure.

In truth, with pocket money non-existent in those days and the arrival of chocolates or sweets into the house a very rare event at the best of times, the sacrifice element then mightn’t have been as great as it seems today.

It was though still a real wrench here and there if a favourite auntie arrive with a bar of chocolate or a packet of Emerald sweets – they had to be carefully put away in a cupboard for a bit of feasting on Easter Sunday.

We were always reassured by the parents and by the Franciscan teachers that our penance would pay off in the long run, in that it would help to greatly shorten our ‘sentences’ in Purgatory for the array of sins that we were likely to accumulate over the course of our lifetimes.

There was also a big push to go to daily Mass during Lent but often early morning farming chores got in the way, and if the truth be known, the ‘jobs’ were often stretched out a bit to ensure that by the time a return was made to the house, it was too late for church.

Come to think of it, that probably neutralised all the sentence mitigation earned with the Lenten sacrifices, as Himself would surely know that a bit of trickery had gone on, in order to avoid one of the daily Masses.

For the slightly older young people, there was also a pretty serious curtailment of their romantic outlets with all of the dancehalls closed down through the Lenten period, a time when all the showbands embarked on their annual tours of the UK, where our emigrants had to endure no such social restrictions.

All hell though tended to break loose on Easter Sunday night, a traditional start-up for many of the early carnivals, with all of the dancehalls re-opening as well, even though Lent was considered to have officially ended on Easter Saturday night.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.