This year Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day) is on March 4th, so, depending on when you get your copy of the Parish Magazine, you may or may not have celebrated it. If you have, I hope you had fun. If you haven’t, you might be inspired by the ways other countries celebrate this day.

In Denmark, sweet buns with their middles hollowed out and filled with jam and cream are eaten.

In France, Shrove Tuesday is called Mardi Gras.

In Poland, competitions are held to find the most delicious doughnut.

In Finland, pea soup and blinis are often eaten.

In the Christian calendar, Shrove Tuesday is seen as a time to use up all the good food in the house before entering the season of Lent. This period is the time before Easter during which Christians reflect on the coming events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and how they relate to their lives today. Sometimes such reflection leads one to feel a desire to deepen one’s relationship with God, hence why it is called Shrove Tuesday, with ‘shrove’ derived from ‘shrive’ meaning ‘to confess’.
We al have the need for renewal in our lives. The movement towards Spring is a time for feeling more connected to life as nature unfurls. Perhaps this stirs thoughts of a divine presence for you. For the writer Nick Hornby, it is music that prompts such thoughts. He wrote about this in his book: 31 Songs: “I try not to believe in God, of course, but sometimes things happen in music, in songs that bring me up short, make me do a double-take … All I can say is that I can hear things that aren’t there, see and feel things I can’t normally see and feel, and start to realise that, yes, there is such a thing as an immortal soul, or at the very least, a unifying human consciousness, that our lives are short but have meaning”.

Hornby continues, “Beyond that, I’m not sure it changes very much really. I’m not going to listen to stuff like this too often, though, just in case”.Worth pondering as we welcome new life this Spring and Lenten season.

Very best,

Corin Redsell
Associate Minister at St Peter’s Church, Barton