As I begin to write this rumination on 2 March 2021, I recall that it was exactly one year ago the office of the president announced the first case of Covid-19 in Indonesia. With no outside activities to mark the days and no celebrations to distinguish one week from the next, the twelve months since have sometimes (in retrospect) seemed to have passed quickly but at other times with unrelenting lethargy. Thinking back several decades, I can remember no other period in my life when a week did not pass without several openings or launches or a month when there was not a weekend in Bali, a book fair abroad, or a family reunion. Given that most of the world is in a no-travel-keep-your-distance mode, I recognize that I am not alone in my feeling this “aloneness” but awareness does not assuage the emotion.
One thing that has served to reduce feelings of angst and aimlessness are monthly Zoom reunions with my nine geographically-distant siblings. Near the end of the most recent one, Colleen, the eighth child, asked the rest of us in the room, “So, what are you giving up for Lent?” Delinquent Catholic that I am, I hadn’t given much thought to Lent or its meaning for a number of years and didn’t realize that this year’s Lenten season had already begun but Colleen’s question immediately took me back to younger years when Holy Days of Obligation were as important in the planning and marking of time as have been openings, receptions, and book fairs in more recent years.
As an aside for the non-cognoscenti, “Holy Days of Obligation” are those days on which Catholics are expected to go to Mass. This includes every Sunday but outside of Easter, which marks the end of Lent and is always celebrated on a Sunday, there are nine others. The most well known is Christmas. For the McGlynn family, these days of obligation and other feast- and saints’ days very much determined the rhythm of our year; Christian rites and rituals were the way we kept track of time.
Besides the already mentioned days, they were many other days when we were expected to attend Mass. A personal favorite was Saint Blaise Day when we as suppliants would stand before
A photograph dating from Ash Wednesday in 2000 when JHM dipped his finger in cigarette ashes to anoint himself and his sister, Colleen.
the Communion railing at Saint Anthony de Padua Church and Father Bornbach would hold a crossed pair of beeswax candles to our necks while intoning a mantra-like prayer to prevent objects from ever becoming stuck in our throats. How one measures the efficacy of this ritual, I do not know, but Grandma McGlynn often told me of a boy my age who got a wish bone caught in his throat and whose life was saved only through Saint Blaise’s intervention. Grandma Schauf’s iteration was that of a boy much like me who fell asleep when chewing bubble gum and surely would have died if Saint Blaise had not prevented the wad of gum from blocking the boy’s thoracic passage. How wondrous, I thought, to be able to evade death with just candles and a prayer!
As titillating as Saint Blaise Day was for me, the Lenten season as a whole trumped all other religious holidays with the exception of Christmas, of course, when the materialistic and the profane edged out religiosity. And though Lent is supposed to be a somber period for reflection, penance, and repentance, I spent more time trying to unravel the mystery of it rituals than dwelling on my venial discretions.
Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, six weeks before Easter, and previous to that day, the Franciscan sisters at St. Anthony’s would have gathered the now-shriveled palm fronds which had adorned statues of saints and doorway lintels since Palm Sunday of the previous year. (Palms not being native to Wisconsin, I mused where they might have come from. My hunch was the Holy Land—unaware as I was that California was a more likely source.) They then would have burnt the palms in a metal container to reduce them to ash, after which the conjurer-priest would have sprinkled the ashes with holy water and incense turned the mixture into a potent slurry that he would the next day smear with his right thumb on foreheads of the faithful in the shape of a cross while saying “from dust you came and from dust you will return.”
I was enthralled by the ceremony and attempted to wear that sign of the cross on my forehead as long as I could, taking care when washing my face to wipe around the cross to prevent its erasure. I firmly believed this outward symbol of faith affirmed my inner sanctity.
After Ash Wednesday services and our return to Saint Anthony’s class rooms, our teachers, the nuns, passed out the flat makings of a mite box in which to store the alms we gathered before Easter, which they purported would be used to save the souls of pagan babies. These colorful make-your-own boxes which we had to fold on dotted lines and crimp tabs had the shape of Animal Crackers boxes and side panels that featured a radiant Jesus with outstretched hands, enfolding within them a vast number of pagan babies of color. These were the children who would benefit from the pennies, nickels, and dimes that we gave up to save young souls who, through no fault of their own, had been born in non-Christian regions.
The nuns’ gave each class a monetary target and if our class could together collect US$ 30 we would have the right to choose the baptismal name for the pagan baby whose soul we had saved. This was 1961 and I remember that when my class achieved that target we voted to give “our” baby the name “John Fitzgerald Kennedy” in honor of the country’s first Roman Catholic president.
Home from school on Ash Wednesday night, the first question Mother would ask, “So, what are you giving up for Lent?” Annually, we’d shout “Watermelon!” or other foods that were not to be found at that time of the year, but Mother would then inveigle us to give up something we really would miss—doughnuts, watching television, or harassing a younger sibling. This was so that in the weeks ahead, until Jesus had arisen from the dead on Easter Day, whenever we got a hankering for the thing we had given up we would be reminded of the far greater hardships that those less fortunate than us are forced to bear.
So it was at our family meeting that when Colleen asked, “So, what are you giving up for Lent?” I was going to answer, “Watermelon!” but Mary, the fourth sister, preempted me and said, “I have thought about this and I am not ‘giving up’ anything! In these times, with so many deaths and so many people out of work, let’s drop the ‘up’ and focus on ‘giving’ instead.” And isn’t she right: instead of thinking of ourselves and our personal, often trivial, troubles, isn’t it the time—Isn’t it always the time?—to be giving instead?
John McGlynn
john_mcglynn@lontar.org