Ash Wednesday
This is my favorite day of the year to be Catholic. There are better days to be Christian (Easter, when God saved us all; Christmas, because who doesn't love presents?), but there's no better day to be Catholic. Except maybe the day a new pope is elected, but I've never experienced that; John Paul II's the only Bishop of Rome I've ever known. It's worth getting up unbogly early in the morning to walk aroudn with the ashes on your forehead all day. This morning's sermon was about praying and giving charitably in quiet, not bragging about your piety, but the ashes fly right in the face of that. Or maybe they don't; maybe they are meant to serve as a reminder to everyone else that today is the beginning of a holy season, even if the Protestants have no sense of decorum.

In any event, one of the things I truly love about being Catholic is the institutional eccentricity. We burn palm leaves and then smear the ashes on our foreheads. For the next month and a half, I can't have meat on Fridays. Why Fridays? And somehow fish doesn't qualify as meat. What about narwhal? Could I eat narwhal on a Friday during Lent? It lives in the sea like a fish (eat it), but it's a mammal like a cow (don't eat it). And why is purple the color of Lent? So bizarre. I love being Catholic.