A new high-speed rail line connecting to the Chinese city of Shangri-La has turned the formerly secluded getaway into a popular attraction for tourists.
今天是天主教四旬大齋期的首日， 稱為聖灰節。
大齋期英文稱Lent，意即春天。拉丁教會稱Quadragesima，意即四十天（四旬）。整個節期從大齋首日（聖灰星期三/塗灰日）開始至復活節止，一共四十天（不計六個主日）。
在這段期間，嚴守信仰的天主教徒一日只能喫一餐正餐，以齋戒、施捨、克己等方式反省自己的罪惡，預備心迎接復活節。四十日的時間起源於耶穌在施洗者約翰受洗後，到荒野禁食並擊退魔鬼以食物、權勢與對天主信靠的試探。
今天是聖灰星期三，天主教會會為信徒舉行塗灰禮，把去年棕枝主日(去年復活節前主日)祝聖過的棕枝燒成灰，在禮儀中塗在教友的額頭上，作為悔改的象徵。
今年的聖灰星期三適逢所謂的情人節，情人節強調愛但基督信仰強調愛與犧牲。用我們台灣話講- 不夠疼怎麼算是愛？ 我參加的教會沒有守四旬齋戒的傳統，只是我會在大齋期間讓自己心也接受齋戒，預備自己迎接復活節的到來。我的額頭沒有被塗灰， 心卻需要有蒙灰悔改的覺悟。
紀念聖灰星期三，開始大齋期。
OPINION
What We Give Up Makes Us Who We Are
Feb. 17, 2024
Credit...Benedikt Luft
By Molly Worthen
Dr. Worthen is a historian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who writes frequently about religion.
Chanequa Walker-Barnes, a professor of practical theology and pastoral care at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia, has an unusual approach to Lent.
Instead of giving up chocolate or fasting, “sometimes I’ll say I’m giving up self-neglect,” she told me. For Lent two years ago she began blogging through “40 Days of Self-Care.” She committed each day to healthier eating, more yoga, meditation and better time management — making do with what she had rather than buying new stuff, since “marketing experts are tapping into self-care,” she said. The reaction from others surprised her: “First friends, and then strangers told me they were following the Lenten challenge. It floored me that people were taking it seriously. It connected to a hunger,” Dr. Walker-Barnes said. She published a book called “Sacred Self-Care” last year.
Dr. Walker-Barnes is one of many Christians who are reclaiming Lent, the 40 days of reflection, repentance and self-denial before Easter. What looks to outsiders like the biggest buzzkill of the church calendar has become a season that some younger Christians look forward to. They see it as a chance to rethink false promises about personal freedom and purpose — promises offered by churches that have let them down, and by a mainstream culture in which podcast gurus push juice cleanses and meditation in the name of self-optimization, a crooked image of the Lenten fast.
The earliest Christians marked the lead-up to Easter with a short period of fasting and repentance. By the late fourth century, Christians in Rome observed a 40-day Lent, according to some historians; in the sixth century Pope Gregory I inaugurated Ash Wednesday, when Christians with especially grievous sins on their conscience were supposed to do public penance in sackcloth and ashes. In 1091, a church synod called for all believers to receive a sprinkling or a smudge of these biblical symbols of repentance to remind them that “you are dust and to dust you will return.”
Over the centuries, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians and some Protestants have continued to observe Lent by abstaining from certain foods or skipping meals, with wide variations in severity. But to many evangelicals Lent long smacked of Catholic ritualism and bad theology, a season of self-punishment that implies you can earn God’s grace through your own effort.
Evangelicals have their own traditions of fasting: Their Puritan ancestors fasted on “days of humiliation” after epidemics, poor harvests and other signs of God’s wrath. Today many evangelical churches encourage some kind of New Year’s fast during January, and there is a marketplace of fasting programs like the “Daniel Fast,” based on Daniel’s preference for vegetables and lentils instead of delicacies from the king’s table in the Book of Daniel. (There’s also a version to help adherents lose weight.)
Dr. Walker-Barnes wonders whether majority-white churches have leaned into a food-focused approach to self-denial that is more bounded by cultural context than they realize. “There are ways to reinterpret what we fast from. For me, grounded in my experience as a Black woman and the ways I have been taught to look at my body and myself as unworthy of care and love, fasting can teach me to suppress and repress my body even more,” she said. For Christians of color, women and L.G.B.T.Q. Christians, “what we need to work on is learning to see ourselves as made in God’s image,” she said.
All major world religions have some tradition of fasting. It is an almost universal practice across time and culture; our species has an impulse to deny bodily desires in order to connect with something transcendent. But that impulse takes on the shape of the society around it, for better and for worse. So how — if at all — should 21st-century Christians submit to ancient disciplines?
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