Today is the last day before the Lenten Season of fasting: Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Tuesday, or Fat Tuesday, or, in French, Mardi Gras.

To “shrive” is to be forgiven your sins, as in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet where the latter is to be “shrived and wived”. Shrove is the conjugation of that verb in the simple past tense.

Today is the day to eat all the food in your house so that you won’t be tempted during Lent. The name “Pancake” Tuesday comes from the ease of eating pretty much any kind of food in pancake form: got onions, cheese, and chicken in the ‘fridge? That’s a tasty, savory pancake! When I was in Catholic School we all got as many ‘cakes as we could eat today — parent-volunteers hung out all morning cooking and you could drop by whenever you liked for a paper plate of flapjacks, butter, and syrup. Good times.

In 2005 I celebrated Lent with a Ramadanesque daylight fast. Nothing puts you more in touch with the rhythms of nature than eating strictly according to them. You feel the lengthening of the days as the world is reborn into Spring.

Today is also the last day to settle on the terms of your personal jihad — in the sense of “holy struggle” — over the coming forty-four days. Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent and the fast, when the faithful are anointed with oil and the ash of burned palm crosses saved from last year’s Palm Sunday.

The palms commemorate the fete of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem riding a donkey — a highly political action in the context of ancient Judean society which intentionally fulfilled a number of Jewish Messiah prophecies, and ended up precipitating the Passion, the Crucifixion, and eventually creating the Christian faith.

Here’s Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Millennium version of that same event. The subtext here is that the Pharisees and the crowd completely misunderstand the scene. They think they are glorifying Jesus and he’s frustrated with them because he’s trying to get them to glorify God (also note the hair-based symbolism — in this scene, the longer your hair the holier you are):

Essentially this religious season mirrors the rebirth of nature, hope, etc. in Spring.