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“Carnival celebrates the unity of our human race as mortal creatures, who come into this world and depart from it without our consent, who must eat, drink, defecate, belch, and break wind in order to live, and procreate if our species is to survive. Our feelings about this are ambiguous. To us as individuals, it is a cause for rejoicing that we are not alone, that all of us, irrespective of age, or sex or rank or talent, are in the same boat.” -- W. H. Auden“O Lord, refresh our sensibilities. Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in, and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with, and casseroles that put starch and substance in our limp modernity. Take away our fear of fat, and make us glad of the oil which ran upon Aaron’s beard. Give us pasta with a hundred fillings, and rice in a thousand variations. Above all, give us grace to live as true folk -- to fast till we come to a refreshed sense of what we have and then to dine gratefully on all that comes to hand. Drive far from us, O Most Bountiful, all creatures of air and darkness; cast out the demons that possess us; deliver us from the fear of calories and the bondage of nutrition; and set us free once more in our own land, where we shall serve thee as thou hast blessed us--with the dew of heaven, the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine.” -- Robert Farrar Capon
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“Ashes, ashes, all fall down. How could I have forgotten? Didn’t I see the heavens wiped shut yesterday, on the road walking? Didn’t I fall from the dark of the stars to these senseless and noisome days? The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams: but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparently perfect for generations on end; and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the millstones’ pitiless turning is real, for our love of each other--for the world and all the products of extension--is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones’ sickening churn and arching to the realm of spirit bare. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother’s body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love’s long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, lie a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.” -- Annie Dillard“The cross, with which the ashes are traced upon us, is the sign of Christ’s victory over death. The words, “Remember that thou art dust and to dust thou shall return” are not to be taken as a quasi-form of a kind of “sacrament of death” (as if such a thing were possible). It might be good stoicism to receive a mere reminder of our condemnation to die, but it is not Christianity.” -- Thomas Merton
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“What the Christian warfare means is giving up sin and building up ways of virtue in place of sin. This is not done without effort and real struggle. Actually, for each person it means mobilizing energies and facing the enemy right at the front lines, and battling there.“While the precise character of the battle varies with the individual persons, the weapons which the church provides are the same for all. And each person will find that these weapons meet precisely her or his individual needs in the battle. These weapons are prayer, fasting and almsgiving.” -- Jane Marie Murray
“In some monastic communities, monks go up to receive the ashes on barefoot. Going barefoot is a joyous thing. It is good to feel the floor or the earth under your feet. It is good when the whole church is silent, filled with the hush of people walking without shoes. One wonders why we wear such things as shoes anyway. Prayer is so much more meaningful without them. It would be good to take them off in church all the time. But perhaps this might appear quixotic to those who have forgotten such very elementary satisfactions. Someone might catch cold at the mere thought of it.” -- Thomas Merton
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