Small beef.

It may not be a small beef as much as it's a pretty large beef.  Big cow. 21 oz. steak.  The qualms are with Ash Wednesday.  I don't like it.

Allow me to qualify, Ash Wednesday is a fine day, a stellar kick off to the Lenten season.  The attitudes that Catholics have towards the day make me irritated though.  This all started about 6 years ago...

(Cue the time warp music now)

I was sitting in church back home for the Ash Wednesday afternoon service, and the church was packed.  Standing room only.  Sunday services never got this full.  Unless it was Christmas or Easter, but that's for a whole different blog post.  The crazy thing was that all the services were like this.  It made me question why Ash Wednesday is probably the third most attended church service of the year.

As the ashes were distributed, the answer came to me.

During this ash distribution, even more people came into the church.  They were late of course, running on the typical Catholic time, but as soon as they got the ashes, they left.  Total time in church, less than five minutes.  This made me realize that I had misplaced the entire focus of my Catholic faith.  I was pissed.

For so long, I thought that receiving the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist (not everyone is going to agree on this; however, since this is my blog, I post my views) was going to help me on my path toward salvation.  All this time I was wrong.  All I needed to do was burn some blessed palm fronds and smear them in the shape of a cross on my forehead.  That's all.

What made me even more infuriated was that the Bible was wrong this whole time.  In the Gospel it is the quiet man praying in the church that is praised by Jesus while the Pharisee who is praying loudly for everyone to hear is ostracized.  That's not how the real world works.  We need to go to church and get our ashes to prove how good of Catholics we are.  Show the whole world that we are great because of the burnt palm fronds.  What's more, it's not even necessary to stay for the whole service, five minutes is enough to be reminded of my own mortality and to get the ole smear-a-roo of ashes on my forehead.  How could I have been so blind?

For so long I was deceived.  Just another giant flaw of the Catholic church.  So I stay irritated at Ash Wednesday, holding my grudge, letting the beef get bigger and bigger.  I do feel the need to spread the word though.  While so many people have figured Ash Wednesday out, I'm positive that there are still some people out there.  People who are like how I was six years ago.  I don't want them to have to come to this terrible realization on their own, so I share.  I only hope that this eases the lesson that needs to be learned.