Rejoice, o Jerusalem!

Christians who observe a liturgical calendar do penance for the 40-day season of Lent, which for Latins (i.e. western Catholics) begins on Ash Wednesday. Some take a break for Sundays, whereas others prefer to keep Lenten Sunday celebrations to a minimum. The official Church rules on penance are a but a light yoke nowadays, and what more we wish or need to do to have a truly fruitful Lent is up to us.

Personally, I have discovered that my Easter Sunday is all the more joyful for a difficult Lenten journey: hunger is the best sauce, as they say. Also, there’s contentment in giving God gifts to the best of my poor ability. As we sang at our local parish church at the Saturday Vigil Mass (more on this anon), “All the vain things that charm me most/I sacrifice them through His blood.”

But traditionally there is a way station about halfway through this our major penitential season, and that is Laetare Sunday, the Fourth Sunday in Lent, called Mothering Sunday in the United Kingdom. Before the Reformation, it was the tradition for townsfolk to go home to their “mother church”, the church of their parents’ village, for Laetare Sunday Mass, which is why it is British Mother’s Day. It is called Laetare Sunday because the Introit (“Entrance hymn”) for the day begins “Laetare Jerusalem,” i.e. Rejoice, o Jerusalem.

The universal custom in the Latin Church is that the vestments for both priests and altars change from purple to rose for a day. Some priests rather pettishly snap “It’s not pink, it’s ROSE” as if denying accusations of effeminacy. (As it happens, pink was a “boy colour” in the 19th century, and blue a “girl colour,” and it is frankly stupid, IMHO, to place limits on the palette in any century.) Depending on where you are, or (more importantly) who your friends are, there might also be a spot of feasting, not to say binging.

The Edinburgh FSSP-supporting “Gin & Tonic Set,” as the now-defunct Men’s Schola and their friends called ourselves, used to have enormous Laetare Sunday lunches of pink borscht, pink salmon or prawns, pink ham, mashed potatoes dyed pink with beet juice, and pink puddings, washed down with hogsheads of rosé and Lambrusco. Our tradition, I was happy to see, has spread to Poland, whence I was yesterday sent photos of pink pastries and a pink buffet by a veteran of our campaign to celebrate every Sunday until 3 AM on Monday.

This year I decided to revive the tradition by having a Pink Cake & Wine party after my husband and I returned from our visit to his mother’s village, i.e. Dundee. Going to Mass in Dundee, we judged, would be too much for the electric wheelchair, so we took it to our nearest Novus Ordo on Saturday evening instead and enjoyed belting out Wesley, Watts and Hemy/Lingard. Then we went home where I continued cleaning, baking and rearranging furniture.

It took me forever to get to sleep partly because of worrying about whether or not one cake would suffice, and partly because of the quantity of raspberry buttercream icing I had consumed after being sugar-free (apart from a slice or two of banana bread) since Ash Wednesday. (Recipes below.) When I got up in the morning, I paused only long enough to swallow some coffee before heading to Tesco to buy butter, eggs and Canadian flour for Cake 2. There followed more baking, cleaning, hoovering, etc., before the taxi took us and the wheelchair away to the railway station and the train delivered us up to the Land of Jute, Jam, and Journalism.

Upon our return, I managed to ice the second cake before our first guests arrived. The second arrival party was female and asked if they could do any thing to help, and as one is a trained chef, I got her to assemble the smoked-salmon-on-dill-and-cream-cheese-on-beetroot-crackers (photo below). The other brought us gorgeous pink tulips from her garden and arranged them in our smallest gluggle jug. Both ladies had made a bottle of rhubarb shrub, and it joined the other vessels on the drinks table.

All the guests brought something pink to eat and/or drink, which very much kept the party going. The ladies brought soda water to go with the rhubarb shrub, and a bottle of V.gna Rosa sparking wine. There were also Angostura bitters to make our G&Ts pink-ish, Tesco’s Finest Prosecco Rosé, Kylie Minogue Rosé, Krupnik Malina (i.e. raspberry) liqueur, Famille Perrin Côtes de Rhône, Fentiman’s Raspberry lemonade and a mysterious Eastern European bottle with a picture of blackberries on the not-quite-Polish label. The latecomers brought bags and bags of “Slow-Roasted Pork & Apple Sauce” crisps (i.e. chips, as the American bringer insisted).

In the end, there were 11 people squished into our minute flat, and I tempted some into the dining-room with my “vintage-style” gramophone and showed them how it works. I did not ever expect that one day I would be explaining to the younger generation the difference between 33, 45 and 78 rpm records, but there I was. The jazz party played Sidney Becket at Storyville and 2 LPs from The Glen Miller Years (The Readers’ Digest Record Library) and discussed attending the local swing-dance society’s post-Easter tea dance.

It seems that wherever we go we cause controversy, for the local SDS expects men to dance with male followers, and our boys won’t. (This, by the way, is one of several reasons why Catholics need our own dances and dancing lessons.) During the fuss, the secular world’s two religious principles of Consent and Inclusion were shown to be in direct contradiction, and one can only hope that a third, Tolerance, will eventually win the day for us. Meanwhile, the SDS organizers can afford live jazz bands, and we can’t.

To help remedy this situation, I have done the unthinkable and returned to playing the piano. I can now plink out “Fly Me To the Moon” although not yet for an audience, let alone dancers. Ideally, I would like to found a TLM jazz band (to audition, please write to info@tradcathsocialdancing.co.uk), which would no doubt cause another flap, but it would be worth that. (By the way, so far all the local jazz instrumentalists I have seen are men. Why?)

So my party wound down not long after 10:30 PM, for the younger generation is either holier or more health-conscious than my own (probably both), and two of its members bore away the remaining veteran of the Gin & Tonic Set days to the bus stop. They left more than half a Black Midnight Cake behind them, so now I am faced with the problem of how to dispose of this excellent cake now that we have again taken up the Lenten discipline.