Let’s Talk about RCIA – Let’s Talk

As the season for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) begins, Fr. Cory Sticha, Steve Nelson, and Jimmy Akin discuss their own experiences leading others through the process or being a part of it themselves, as well as how it has improved in recent years.

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What’s the Point of All Saints Day?

saintsEvery December, the secular, cultural celebration of Christmas overshadows the religious holiday on which it is based.

Essentially the same thing happens at the end of October, when the way American culture celebrates Halloween overshadows All Saints Day.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with costumes and candy, but in the minds of most people Halloween has become so detached from its religious roots that they have no idea where it comes from.

The old-fashioned word Halloween contributes to this. People may have an inkling that it’s short for “All Hallows Eve,” but that doesn’t help much—because they don’t know what a hallow is or what it means to celebrate the eve of something.

English has an unusual double vocabulary, with many words based on Latin roots but others based on German roots. That’s why we have two words for so many things. One example is cat (derived from a German root) and feline (derived from a Latin root). The word hallow belongs to one of these German/Latin pairs. But it’s much less familiar to us than the parallel word from Latin: saint.

Hallow comes from the same root as holy, and a person who is hallowed is a saint—someone who has been sanctified or made holy. Thus in the Lord’s Prayer we say “Hallowed be thy name.” If we said that in using words derived from Latin, it would be something like, “Let your name be sanctified”—i.e., may people treat God’s name as something holy and thus honor the holiness of God himself.

The –een part of Halloween is similarly old-fashioned. “E’en” is a contraction of the word even, an older way of saying “evening.” Halloween is thus “All hallows e’en” or “the evening of All Saints Day,” and it came to be celebrated as an early anticipation of the day that followed, the same way people celebrate Christmas Eve in anticipation of Christmas Day.

But why celebrate All Saints Day in the first place? Some of our Protestant friends object to the Catholic custom of celebrating certain saints and giving them special attention. Aware that there are liturgical days commemorating individual saints, they want to know why there aren’t celebrations for all the other people in heaven.

After all, in Revelation John describes the population of heaven this way:

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Rev. 7:9-10).

Don’t all those other people deserve recognition, too?

The answer is that they do, and this is why we have All Saints Day. Since there are only 365 days in the year, not every person in heaven can have his own liturgical commemoration, but they all should be recognized for the way they cooperated with God’s grace. Thus All Saints Day was created to commemorate every last individual in heaven, even those who salvation is known to God alone.

So if your departed grandmother is in heaven, even though she’s never been canonized, on All Saints Day the Catholic Church commemorates her and the work God did in her life. She, too, has a place in the liturgical calendar, alongside the more famous saints.

Precisely when that day occurs will depend which liturgical calendar you are using.

In many Eastern Catholic Churches, the commemoration of all the saints is held on the Sunday after Pentecost, which has a certain logic since Pentecost was the event that led to the evangelization of the world and the salvation of so many souls.

In the West, November 1 became the date on which all the saints are commemorated. Sometimes people will try to tarnish this with pagan associations, claiming that it was based on the Gaelic holiday Samhain, as celebrated in the British Isles.

But All Saints Day didn’t originate in the British Isles. The reason November 1 was picked is that Pope Gregory III (731-741) dedicated a chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to all the saints and fixed its anniversary as November 1.

Later, Pope Gregory IV (827-844) extended this celebration to the whole of the Western Church. This led to the commemoration of the evening before as All Hallows Eve, and it led to the following day—November 2—being celebrated as All Souls Day, when we pray for all the souls who are still being purified on their way to heaven.

Though we disagree about various matters, both Catholics and Protestants say the Apostles’ Creed, and when we do so we profess belief in “the communion of saints.” The celebration of All Saints Day is one of the ways Catholics live out this profession.

All Saints Day came to be a very important liturgical day, and today it is a holy day of obligation, meaning that Catholics must observe it by going to Mass, as they do on Sundays.

This makes All Saints different than the commemorations of individual saints. None of the saints living after biblical times are commemorated with holy days of obligation. However famous saints like Augustine, Aquinas, and Thérèse of Lisieux may be, they don’t have such an important day on the liturgical calendar.

But the whole body of the saints in heaven—sainted grandmothers included—do. The Catholic Church thus not only remembers individual saints; it takes seriously it’s profession of the entire communion of saints.

Pluck Out Your Eye?

 

Discern_vol4_no3_fb_if-your-right-eye-causes-you-to-sinSunday, September 30, is the Twenty-Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year B). Mass Readings: Numbers 11:25-29, Psalm 19:8, 10, 12-13, 14, James 5:1-6, Mark 9:38-43, 45, 47-48

* * *

This Sunday’s readings have two prominent themes. The first is that God can work outside of expected, formal situations.

We see this in the reading from Numbers, where God takes some of the spirit he gave to Moses and endows seventy elders with it. Two of the elders—Eldad and Medad—weren’t present for the ceremony, yet God gave them the spirit as well, and they prophesied. Upon learning this, Joshua asked Moses to stop them—perhaps implying that they were delinquent in not coming to the ceremony and therefore had no right to prophecy. But Moses took a more generous attitude and said he could wish all of God’s people were prophets.

Something similar happens in the Gospel, where the disciples report to Jesus that they told an exorcist to stop driving out demons in Jesus’ name because “he does not follow us.” Jesus, too, took a more generous attitude, telling them, “Whoever is not against us is for us.”

This shows us that, out of his love, God can bestow his grace and work miracles, even outside of the situations you’d expect. It also shows us that, when he does so, we should take a generous attitude toward it—an important lesson for us and the ecumenical situation we face today.

The second theme deals with sin. St. James warns his readers—particularly rich ones who have exploited the poor—that their comeuppance will arrive. They have indeed, “stored up treasure for the last days,” but not in the way they thought! “Behold, the wages you withheld from the workers who harvested your fields are crying aloud.” Exploitative landowners have actually accumulated a “wealth” of judgment.

To keep such judgment from happening to us, Jesus tells us we must deal decisively with sin. “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off”; “and if your foot causes you to sin, cut if off”; “and if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” This is a classic example of hyperbole, or exaggeration to make a point. Jesus doesn’t intend us to literally make ourselves blind, lame, or handless. Doing those things wouldn’t actually deal with the problem, since—as he elsewhere says—sin actually proceeds from our hearts, our inner selves. Instead, his point is that we must do whatever it takes to deal effectively with sin.

Part of that effort is prayer. We need God’s help to overcome our innate, sinful tendencies. His grace is what allows us to conquer them. We will make mistakes, even unintentionally, without being aware of it. Thus the Psalmist praises God’s commandments and says, “though your servant is careful of them, very diligent in keeping them, yet who can detect failings? Cleanse me from my unknown faults!”

At the same time, God can empower us so that we avoid mortal sin. Thus the Psalmist also prays, “From wanton sin especially, restrain your servant; let it not rule over me. Then shall I be blameless and innocent of serious sin.” This should ever be our prayer, so we lay up real treasure for the last days.

“Let’s Take Him Down a Peg”

 

Sunday, September 23, is the Twenty-Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year B). Mass Readings: Wisdom 2:12, 17-20, Psalm 54:3-6, 8, James 3:16-4:3, Mark 9:30-37

a-jesus-in-trial-before-the-roman-empire_0* * *

By God’s design, human beings are social rather than solitary creatures. We need to live in society with other humans, and that means we need to pay attention to our status and reputation, to make sure we have a safe and stable place in society.

Under the influence of sin, this natural need becomes distorted. It leads to envy, blind ambition, and conflict. Thus St. James warns us: “Where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every foul practice”; “Where do the wars and where do the conflicts among you come from? Is it not from your passions?”

When we sense that someone is getting ahead of us, there can be a sinful desire to “take him down a peg,” to reduce his status as a way of elevating our own, so that we can feel better about ourselves. The author of Wisdom shows us this thought process playing out in the minds of the wicked as they consider the righteous: “Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us; he sets himself against our doings, reproaches us for transgressions of the law.” That impulse can even lead the wicked to have murderous designs against the just one: “Let us condemn him to a shameful death; for according to his own words, God will take care of him.”

This contains a Messianic prophecy, for precisely such envy would lead the authorities to plot Jesus’ death. Thus in this week’s Gospel, we find him again predicting: “The Son of Man is to be handed over to men and they will kill him, and three days after his death the Son of Man will rise.”

Jesus’ disciples were perplexed and too afraid to ask him to explain this. What they didn’t realize is that they were falling into the same trap as the authorities. As they walked along the road, they argued about which among them was the greatest. Jesus had offered them secure, even honored places in God’s new society—but they weren’t content with these and petty place seeking began among the Twelve.

Jesus confronted them with their selfish ambition and taught them that “if anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” Rather than being built on ambition and narcissism, God’s new society would be built on humility, service, and love.

At points in our lives, all of us have been victims of people who want to humiliate us. All of us have been able to say, with the Psalmist, “O God, hear my prayer; hearken to the words of my mouth. For the haughty men have risen up against me.”

God knows our need to have a safe and stable place in society. He knows we need to be concerned about our reputations. But we must keep our sinful tendencies in check and not give in to pride. We must seek to serve others, and—above all—we must not seek to humiliate them just so we can think better of ourselves.

What Would Jesus Do?—Are You Sure?

 

wwjdSunday, September 16, is the Twenty-Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year B). Mass Readings: Isaiah 50:5-9, Psalm 116:1-6, 8-9, James 2:14-18, Mark 8:27-35

* * *

We’ve all seen those bracelets that say, “What would Jesus do?” This question can be a helpful reminder of our need to use Jesus as a reference point and to follow the example of our Lord. That’s the theme of Thomas a Kempis’s spiritual classic The Imitation of Christ.

It’s also a welcome point of agreement with our separated brethren. In fact, “What would Jesus do?” has been particularly popular in the Protestant community, initially being popularized by the nineteenth century Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon and the Congregationalist author Charles Sheldon and his novel In His Steps.

Though the subject of faith and works has long been contentious between Catholics and Protestants, both recognize—with St. James—the need to put our faith into practice: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone says he has faith but does not have works;” “Faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”

While “What would Jesus do?” is an important question to ask, it comes with a huge caveat. There’s a well-known saying in biblical studies: “By their Lives of Christ ye shall know them.” What this means is that scholars tend to write biographies of Jesus that essentially remake him in the image that the author prefers. Marxist scholars envision a Marxist Jesus; politically conservative scholars see a politically conservative Jesus; etc.

There’s an example of just that phenomenon in this Sundays’ Gospel reading. When Jesus declares that he will be rejected by the authorities, killed, and rise on the third day, “Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.” The prince of the apostles couldn’t imagine such things happening to Jesus—who Peter had just, correctly, identified as God’s long awaited Messiah. The Life of Christ that Peter was envisioning would have had an entirely different ending!

Peter must have been shocked when Jesus, in full view of the other disciples, rebuked him in turn, saying, “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” Indeed, Jesus was determined to perform a different mission than Peter and others had in mind for him. Rather than being a political deliverer who would expel the hated Romans from Israel, he would fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah: “I gave my back to those who beat me,
my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting.”

And yet Jesus would also emerge from the grave, fulfilling the prophecy of the Psalms: “For he has freed my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling. I shall walk before the Lord in the land of the living.”

None of this was imaginable to Peter or his fellow disciples, and it reveals to us that—when we ask the question, “What would Jesus do?”—we need to ask follow-up questions: “How sure am I that I really understand what Jesus would do? Am I recasting him in my own image, just rationalizing what I want to do? Am I thinking like men rather than God?”

 

God’s Compassion for the Disadvantaged

 

compassionSunday, September 9, is the Twenty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year B). Mass Readings: Isaiah 35:4-7, Psalm 146:6-10, James 2:1-5, Mark 7:31-37

* * *

In this Sunday’s Gospel, we read the story of a deaf man. Because he couldn’t hear properly, he also couldn’t properly calibrate the way he spoke, and so he had a speech impediment and was hard to understand. Anyone in his situation would find the two conditions painfully frustrating and embarrassing, and though most of us are blessed with good hearing and speech, we’ve all faced the awkwardness and frustration of not understanding others and of not being understood.

Fortunately, Jesus had compassion on the man and healed both his hearing and his speech impediment. This was one of the signs of the Christ, for Isaiah had prophesied that in the Messiah’s day, the deaf would hear and the mute would speak. Not only that, the blind would see and the lame would regain their ability to walk—miracles that Jesus also performed.

The fact Jesus did these miracles reveals his identity as the Messiah, the Savior that God had promised centuries beforehand. The miracles also reveal something else: God’s compassion for the disadvantaged. God knows the pain and frustration of all who are disadvantaged—whether they are blind, deaf, mute, lame, or anything else. This is why the Psalms say that God “secures justice for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets captives free.”

God’s compassion extends to everyone, no matter what disadvantages they face. Thus he “raises up those who were bowed down” and “protects strangers”—those travelling in foreign lands, who face hostility and have no support network to sustain them. In the ancient world, many men died young, leaving their children and wives alone, but “the fatherless and the widow the Lord sustains.”

Few things are certain in life, and we must not presume that we will always have the advantages that we do now. Because we won’t. One day we all will face hardship—whether it’s due to the death of a loved one, an illness, an accident, or a financial reversal. One day all of us will be disadvantaged in some way.

We must share God’s compassion for the disadvantaged, for one day all of us will need it ourselves. Among other things, this means that we must not show favoritism. St. James warns us against giving preferential treatment to the rich and well-advantaged. In the first century church, that might mean telling a rich, finely dressed man, “Sit here, please,” while telling a poor, shabbily dressed man, “Stand there,” or “Sit at my feet.”

By doing these things, we would set ourselves up as judges who look only at temporary, outward appearances—at fortunate or unfortunate circumstances that frequently are beyond the control of the person who experiences them. But God has compassion on everyone, regardless of their circumstances, and we need to show a corresponding, universal compassion on everyone.

After all, difficult days are coming our way. All of us will face hardship in the future. All of us will need to be shown compassion by others. And all of us will be grateful when we receive it. Let us show it to others today.

Religion, Relationship, and Ritual

religion-relationshipSunday, September 2, is the Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year B). Mass Readings: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8, Psalms 15:2-5, James 1:17-18, 21-22, 27, Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

* * *

Sometimes we hear people running down the concept of religion. “Jesus didn’t come to bring us a religion,” they say, “but he wants to have a relationship with us.” Other times we hear people say they are “spiritual” but not “religious.” Both of these are based on an impoverished understanding of what religion is—as if it simply consisted of unimportant rituals or arbitrary doctrines.

But real religion involves neither of these. It doesn’t contain arbitrary doctrines but truths that have been revealed by God. It also involves genuine relationships with God, with Christ, and with our fellow human beings.

Thus St. James tells us that “religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” Having a real relationship with God means not only loving him but loving our neighbors as well—especially our less fortunate neighbors.

Yet it is possible to become too focused on external rituals. This happened with Jesus’ critics, who faulted his disciples for not washing their hands before they ate, in violation of the custom of their day. But this custom was not based on God’s teaching. It isn’t found in the Mosaic Law. Jesus thus rebuked his critics for “teaching as doctrines human precepts.”

Like the prophets before him, Jesus made it clear that moral values take precedence over mere ritual observances: “From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. All these evils come from within and they defile.”

This is not to say that rituals are unimportant. Ritual appears in every culture, showing that it’s built into human nature. Thus God gave Israel rituals alongside moral commandments in the Old Testament Law. This Law was a model of wisdom for the people of the ancient near east, and by observing it the Israelites would show “wisdom and intelligence to the nations,
who will hear of all these statutes and say, ‘This great nation is truly a wise and intelligent people.’”

God has ordained different rituals for us today, but ritual—together with the moral imperatives that flow from the ethic of love—is an important part of how we relate to God.

Rather than talking down religion, we should recognize and embrace the concept, for it is a biblical one. In doing so, we should embrace the impulse for ritual that God built into human nature, but we should also recognize the transcendent importance of love. This is taught in both the Old and the New Testaments. When Jesus identified the first and second great commandments as love of God and love of neighbor, he was quoting from the Law of Moses.

We thus should “be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.” And we always should strive to be one who “walks blamelessly and does justice; who thinks the truth in his heart,” for “whoever does these things shall never be disturbed.”

Understanding the Ascension of Jesus

Ascension of Christ. 1510-1520. Oil on panel. Image licenced to Amy Jordan CNN PRODUCTIONS by Amy Jordan Usage : - 3000 X 3000 pixels (Letter Size, A4) © Scala / Art Resource

In this episode of Catholic Answers Live (May 25, 2017, 1st hour), Jimmy answers the following questions:

1:29 Why is Ascension Thursday a holy day of obligation in some places and not others?

5:30 How do we know the Ascension happened on a Thursday?

7:20 When will we get our glorified bodies?

8:10 How does Jesus’ glorified body work?

9:25 Why didn’t the disciples always recognize Jesus immediately?

17:35 Why does the Gospel of Mark end the way it does? Why do Matthew and Luke end differently?

23:45 Where did the Ascension take place?

24:10 Did the disciples go to Galilee (as Matthew and Mark say) to encounter Jesus or did they see him in Jerusalem (as Luke says)?

27:20 Does only Luke mention the Ascension?

28:25 Why does Jesus tell Mary Magdalene not to touch him in relation to the Ascension?

30:30 How are Jesus’ appearances in the 40 days different than his appearances to saints? What about his appearance to St. Paul?

33:05 Why did Jesus ascend? What was the purpose of the Ascension?

36:30 Why did Jesus go *up*? Is heaven *up*? Why is God depicted as being in the sky?

44:35 How do we know Luke didn’t make up the Ascension?

48:38 Who were Luke’s sources? Did they include Peter and Paul themselves?

51:15 When did Christians start proclaiming the Ascension?

51:55 What happened with the two “men in white” at the Ascension? Who were they, and what was their message?

Mass Distractions: The Less Is More Principle

question-markThis week at St. Anonymous the Ambiguous, there was a priest I hadn’t seen before.

He was a younger priest who struck me as sincere, earnest, and orthodox, so I was favorably disposed to him.

I was also grateful that he wasn’t the emotionally insecure, narcissistic priest who sometimes fills in and makes himself the center of attention by pacing up and down the aisle and into the transepts, sometimes going as far back as fourteen rows down the main aisle, so that he’s standing behind most of the congregation (and directly behind many of them) as he yells his scoldy, overwrought sermons into the wireless mic.

That guy drives me nuts.

So I was really glad it wasn’t him, and that automatically made me like the new guy.

This didn’t stop there from being some distractions, though.

 

Heart Trouble

Early in his homily, the new priest said the following (quoting from memory):

The heart of the gospel is the Sermon on the Mount
And the heart of the Sermon on the Mount is the Beatitudes
And the Beatitudes show us the heart of God.

I get what the priest was trying to do here. He wanted to say that the Beatitudes show us the heart of God.

But this is a case of less is more, because he should have just said that.

By introducing the statement the way he did, it popped me right out of the sermon, causing me to become distracted as I tried to figure out what he meant.

The heart of the gospel is the Sermon on the Mount? Really? Not Jesus? Not his death and resurrection? Not God’s love for man? Not something like that?

Also, the Sermon on the Mount is in Matthew 5-7, so it’s right near the front of Matthew’s Gospel, not at its heart.

And the Beatitudes are right at the beginning of Matthew 5, so they aren’t “geographically” at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, either.

One wouldn’t even want to say that the Sermon on the Mount is the heart of Jesus’ ethical teachings, because that would be the first and second great commandments, which aren’t discussed until Matthew 22.

So I was distracted by trying to figure out what kind of “heart” language the priest was using when the priest finally got where he was going: The Beatitudes show us the heart of God.

Homilists take note: Getting rhetorically fancy like this can severely distract your audience, so apply the K.I.S.S. principle (Keep It Simple, Sir).

 

Ex Cathedra

A little later in the homily, the priest started to explain the term ex cathedra. (I’m not sure why.)

He explained (correctly) that it means “from the chair,” the chair being a symbol of a pope’s or bishop’s authority.

He explained (incorrectly) that the pope sits in a special chair when he proclaims a dogma.

At least, that’s what I thought I heard him say.

I may have missed a verb tense, and he may have said that the pope used to sit in a special chair when proclaiming a dogma.

But I have no evidence that that’s true, either. As far as I’m aware, the use of the phrase ex cathedra in connection with dogmas didn’t come about until the Middle Ages, when the term cathedra had already begun to be used metaphorically for a bishop’s magisterium or teaching authority.

I certainly can’t think of any dogmas that were ever proclaimed by a pope while sitting in his cathedra.

In reality, popes proclaim dogmas via special documents.

Since I’m not really sure what this had to do with the Beatitudes (the subject of the Gospel reading), I’m inclined to say this is another case of less is more. Omitting the digression about the meaning of ex cathedra would have let him make his point more clearly.

 

Becoming a Christian

Toward the end of the homily, the priest said something along the lines of:

When we become a Christian, we lose all fear.
When we become a Christian, we gain great confidence (or maybe he said “perfect love”).

Bang! Again I’m popped right out of the sermon.

The distraction in this case is that all of the baptized already are Christians, and it’s plain that they don’t lose all fear.

So I’m off thinking about 1 John 4:18, where John says:

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love.

But John is talking about being perfected in love–something that happens later in the Christian life, if it happens in this life at all, not when we first become Christians.

This forced me to wonder, “What is the priest is going for?” Does he realize he may cause scrupulosity among some who are present if they infer from their fears that they aren’t truly Christians yet? Doesn’t he realizes that he’s in a building full of people who were baptized as babies and therefore have no memory of a time when they were not Christians? Why is he saying something that would (at best) apply only to adult converts?

I could only conclude that he was trying to employ some kind of rhetorical flourish by stating things in hyperbolically absolute terms.

So once again, his rhetoric was getting in the way of his message.

So once again, less is more.

 

The End of Christmas

At the end of Mass, during the announcements, the priest said that we’re coming up on Candlemas, “which is the end of the Christmas season,” that it “comes back for a day” and then goes away.

This is false. According to the Universal Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar:

Christmas Time runs from First Vespers (Evening Prayer I) of the Nativity of the Lord up to and including the Sunday after Epiphany or after 6 January.

That means the Christmas season ends no later than January 13, which is weeks before Candlemas occurs on February 2.

It isn’t clear to me whether the priest thought that the Christmas season literally ends on Candlemas or whether he thought it “kinda-sorta” ends on Candlemas, since that day commemorates events in the Infancy Narratives.

If the former, he was simply wrong and does not know the details of the liturgical calendar.

If the latter, he knowingly misled the congregation, who is not familiar enough with the details of the liturgical calendar to be able to detect the “kinda-sorta” aspect of what he was saying.

Either way, people in the congregation will end up thinking that the Christmas season literally ends on Candlemas, and that’s false.

I have some sympathy here. I’ve been in situations where I’m pressed in public to give an answer I’m not 100% sure of, and I’ve made mistakes. (I’ve afterwards made scrupulous efforts to check myself and to avoid making similar mistakes in the future.)

However, this was not a situation where he was being pressed. It was a situation where he was volunteering something.

Bottom line: If you aren’t sure of a claim, don’t make it.

Less is more.

If nothing else, it helps avoid distractions and makes your message clearer.

One More Reason for Easter Eggs

easter-eggsI grew up and went to college in Arkansas, where the chicken industry is big.

I remember sitting in a college biology class where the professor was explaining how selective breeding (this was in the days before gene editing) had improved the industrial usefulness of chickens.

The example I remember him citing was how, through selective breeding, the food-to-meat ratio of commercial breeds of chickens had been altered, so you now got more meat per pound of chicken feed that you fed the chicken.

(I made mental notes for a future science fiction story involving selective breeding of humans, though I haven’t gotten around to writing that one.)

And an improved food-to-meat ratio was only one characteristic of chickens that selective breeding had made possible.

 

There’s another that is directly related to why we have Easter eggs.

I’ve pointed out for a long time that chickens don’t stop laying just because it’s Lent, and so if–as in the olden days–people were abstaining not just from meat but from eggs as well then by the end of Lent you’re going to have a lot of eggs you need to use up.

The logical thing to do is celebrate the Resurrection (and the ability to eat eggs again) by having an egg party, perhaps by coloring the little things to make them more festive. Hence: Easter eggs.

All that’s true, but today I was reading an article on how refrigeration was controversial when it was first introduced (believe it or not), and the article mentioned a fact about pre-selectively-bred chickens that I hadn’t known:

To illustrate the importance of refrigeration for eggs, Friedberg notes that they used to be a seasonal food. Before modern breeds were developed, hens laid most of their eggs in the spring. That meant that fresh eggs were unavailable or very expensive for most of the year (SOURCE: Livia Gershon, “When Refrigeration Was Controversial,” JSTOR Daily, August 14, 2016).

Got that?

Not only would the hens not stop laying for Lent, Lent was the only time they would lay (“Lent” being the Old English word for spring).

Therefore, if you were a Christian and abstaining from eggs for Lent, you’d miss the lion’s share of your only chance of the year to have them unless you used up all those eggs that were laid during Lent.

One more reason for Easter eggs!