…and kinda go overboard. That’s what shrovetide is about. You may already know before Easter we have
Shrovetide actually starts the ninth Sunday before Easter—two weeks ago. That’s 63 days before, but western Christian custom is to round it up to 70 and call it Septuagesima Sunday (from the Latin for 70, of course). The Sunday after that is 56 days before, so round it up again and it’s Sexagesima Sunday (for 60); and this Sunday is 48 days before, so Quinquagesima Sunday (for 50). Although more Christians simply call this day Shrove Sunday, the Sunday before Lent starts. And the last day of shrovetide is Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday.
Eastern Christians feel they always gotta outdo western Christians, so their customs start even earlier, with the 11th Sunday before Easter. It’s called Zacchaeus Sunday, ’cause it’s the week
The English verb
Honestly we should be living this way all the time. But liturgical churches use shrovetide as a way of waking Christians up: Easter’s coming! Get your
The rest… not so much.
Party time! Excellent!
I didn’t grow up with shrovetide and Lent.
’Cause the way a lot of people “practice” shrovetide is to get their sins out of their systems… by committing them. Fr’instance in the United States we have Mardi Gras—French for “gross Tuesday,” a translation I like way better than the usual “fat Tuesday.” It may have a lot of awesome jazz, but there’s also a lot of nasty behavior at Mardi Gras festivals. I’ve been to the New Orleans festival once, as a kid. All I remember were floats, beads, and coins which annoyingly didn’t work in vending machines. I vaguely remember drunken revelers, but Mom definitely remembers that part of it, and found the rest so horrifying she sought us refuge in a church building.
In other parts of the world they celebrate Carnaval, Latin for—I kid you not—“flesh party.” (Put carnal and festival together, and you get carnaval.) The general idea of these parties is you get all your vices out of your system by indulging them. ’Cause during Lent you’re meant to stop indulging them. So do your drinking and fighting and promiscuity now, while you still can. As if we aren’t supposed to put away this stuff once we start following Jesus.
See, this behavior is so antithetical to Christianity, I can’t help but conclude practicing Catholics never created these festivals. More like lapsed Catholics who wanted to have some ironic fun at the expense of the devout. ’Cause you notice who actually goes to these functions: Pagans and irreligious Christians. The devout stay home… unless they’re actually trying to evangelize the revelers, as my brother tried to do one year. (Hey, Jesus loves ’em too.)
Enough about what they’re up to. My point is Fundies, and other Christians who really don’t wanna practice any more self-control than they already do (assuming they practice any at all), actually use the revelry as
You think I haven’t noticed their underlying bad attitudes? “Look at those people. They sin their brains out, then go to confession. As if that wipes their slate clean.” And yeah, if you’re an irreligious Catholic it’s exactly how you think: Sin Tuesday, repent Wednesday;
But that’s like assuming every drunken Christmas party is a Protestant thing, or shopping mall riots are how we thank God for his blessings
Yeah, some Christians, including devout Christians, are gonna do a bit of feasting during shrovetide because Lent is a time of fasting. And that’s fine. Going overboard into sin is not fine, and that’s where the Carnaval partiers go horribly wrong—and where they expose themselves as not truly being Christian. If we truly follow Jesus, we aren’t gonna go there! Humans may be creatures of extremes, but we know better—and
So let’s shrive.
Most Christians pay little attention to shrovetide till it’s Shrove Sunday. Or even Shrove Tuesday. Then suddenly it’s “Oh yeah; I
Go ahead and do all that stuff. It’s good stuff!—when done correctly, and for the right reasons. But the one thing shrovetide is named for, is the one thing we should probably do most: We gotta start confessing our sins.
’Cause we’ve all sinned. We’ve all slipped up. We’re nowhere near the level of God’s glory.
If you choose to opt out of Lent, you can. But don’t opt out of confession. Never opt out of fighting sin.