Ash Wednesday

Evelyn Waugh on Ash Wednesday in New Orleans, written for LIFE magazine: "….There is witchcraft in New Orleans, as there was at the court of Mme. de Montespan. Yet it was there that I saw one of the most moving sights of my tour. Ash Wednesday; warm rain falling in streets unsightly with the draggled survivals of carnival. The Roosevelt Hotel overflowing with crapulous tourists planning their return journeys. How many of them knew anything about Lent? But across the way the Jesuit Church was teeming with life all day long; a continuous, dense crowd of all colors and conditions moving up to the altar rails and returning with their foreheads signed with ash. And the old grim message was being repeated over each penitent: ‘Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.’ One grows parched for that straight style of speech in the desert of modern euphemisms…"

Ronald Blythe on the start of Lent. “What shall my discipline be? Rather than fast I will say Compline before I sleep. Also feed on George Herbert. And recognise that the wilderness is not the wasteland.”