As if in answer to my post-modern soliloquy last week, in which I wondered how we should rightly orient our interior lives to the seasons, the missal reminded me yesterday that the autumn Ember Days are upon us. For those of us who are unfamiliar, these days of encouraged fasting and prayer are ancient liturgical observances around the turning of the seasons, inviting us to incarnation and contemplation. As a 1917 encyclopedia explains, “The purpose of their introduction, besides the general one intended by prayer and fasting, was to thank God for the gifts of nature, to teach men to make use of them in moderation, and to assist the needy.”
Here is a saving of (and mainstay against) contemporary culture’s mercenary posture toward the seasons. (Interestingly, Ember Days, also called the quattor tempora or “Four Seasons,” are thought to date back to Ancient Roman worship of the gods Christianized by the early church. Their original purpose was an illuminating of pagan practice.)
Although there is much to read surrounding Ember Days and different opinions as to who exactly initiated them, the tradition centers around gratitude for the seasons, what each signifies and brings—whether wheat or grapes or olives or reprieve from cold—and benediction of the work ahead. Liturgical readings grew to include sorrow for past wrongs and renewal. For each of the seasons, three days are set aside (for fall and winter of this year, September 20, 22, 23 and December 20, 22, 23). We still have today and tomorrow for autumn and three days in December, when the world, for some of us, will look and feel a different place.
A posture of incarnation and contemplation, I wrote, because a real observance of the Ember Days seems to require an authentic encounter with what’s going on outside. We can hardly participate without being in our bodies, being in the flesh, looking and seeing: carrying the heavy basket of eggplants and tomatoes from the garden or the market, giving away what we cannot use. If we choose to fast and abstain from meat on these days, this discipline too roots us in our bodies. Otherwise, the gratitude and prayer that follow risk a kind of hollowness.
So too, of course, as I hoped to express last week, any decorating or celebrating.
As usual, the old teaches us a proper orientation toward being in time: thankfulness for what has been provided, confession and renewal, prayer, and abandonment toward what is to come, and God, intimately present in all. Ember Days articulate a disposition of both activity and receptivity, and this might be the way beyond fear.
In honor of these September Ember Days, just a short note this week, and I will be shifting to a bi-weekly schedule for the time being (unless I can’t help it!).
Thank you, as always, for being here. Words, too, bear a kind of harvest.
Yours, Mary Catherine