Or: How to Confuse Your Friday – Bi-ritual Lent cont’d.

1. Forget to check your Maronite liturgical calendar (or, possibly, forget that we’re in March and look at the wrong day.)
2. Feel hungry.
3. Message your dearest Maronite friend to tell her that you’re hungry, so that, even though she’s busy fasting, meditating, working, running a household and bathing the feet of the infirm poor, she has to message back to tell you it’s a Maronite Feast Day.
4. Agonise at the memory of your vegan lunch and the thought that you didn’t buy a massive doughnut on the way home because it is Friday.
5. Consider that you still have dinner to think of and skip to the fridge in anticipatory delight.
6. Suddenly remember that, while you’re attempting a Maronite Lent, you’re still canonically Western, and today is a Friday.
7. Stop skipping and stand very still.
8. Wonder if there’s any chance that today is a feast in the Western calendar, too.
9. Peer at your Roman-parish-bulletin calendar on the fridge and realise that it ends at the beginning of Lent because you haven’t been to a Western Mass for a new calendar because you’re now Maronite.
10. Figure that eggs and cheese will be feast by Maronite standards and abstinence by Latin standards.
11. Make an omelette.
12. Happy Feast!