The Godless heathen I am did notice, since yesterday, that we are in the Holy Week, the one leading to Easter. Yesterday was of course Palm Sunday, today is Holy Monday. Which means... Well, nothing at first. Monday is just a boring, monotonous working day, the first of the week. This didn't change. When I was a child, growing up in a still Catholic society, Holy Monday was at school a rerun of Palm Sunday. My parents being Godless heathens (which I didn't know at that time), we didn't go to mass so I didn't have the real day, but at school we spent a good deal of the day with palms, crosses made of palms and doing a bit of a ceremony, praying, telling the story of Palm Sunday. I guess it was easier to be brainwashed through gimmicks.I learn from Wikipedia that the stories of the Scriptures associated with Holy Monday have, among others, the cursing of the fig tree. Which I find very mean, if anything like this ever happened, as I love fig trees. Seriously, cursing a tree? That is cold.
If I had the power to curse, I would curse Monday as a day in general (although I suspect that through the ages, having been cursed over and over again, something stuck to Monday) and Holy Monday in particular. Because nowadays, in my experience, Holy Monday is a Monday that feels longer, where Easter and the weekend is closer, yet feels so far away. Because the closer you get to a holiday, the longer the days are until you actually get there. So every Holy Monday, it feels even more like Monday than usual, it feels more like Hell. Like it will never end. So it is for me an Accursed Monday.
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3 comments:
i so identify with this!
If you are assiduous in your studies, you will find that much of the stuff in religion that seems superstitious is actually very practical.
For instance, nobody believes in spirits anymore. Spirits? Come on that's just superstition.
Until you look up the etymology of the word spirit, and you realize it means breath, and then you re-read the texts with breathing in mind, and it all starts to make sense. You might even learn something useful. Like what happens when you breathe like the yogis tell you.
We were talking about Yeshua the other day, and his riding into Jerusalem on the donkey, and how the people threw palms in the road.
I don't know the significance of the burning of the palms and applying the ash, but I do know that when you burn vegetation you get potash, which is very alkali. Putting it on your skin just sucks the water right out. It's a very useful treatment for edema, I've used it myself.
The more you know!
@Jaz-I think it may be even worse on Wednesday!
@Mantan Calaveras-I know many religious rituals have some practical origins. Many feasts were meant to finish perishable food while we could, for instance. But all the same, many rituals for my Catholic childhood had a more devious motive: turning us into good unthinking Catholics.
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