Chances are that, if you're a Roman Catholic attending the average Roman Catholic parish, the term "Ember Day" is a new one for you. You could be hardly blamed for this. During the liturgical changes in the 1960s, Ember Days were all but completely removed from the Church's liturgical calendar. While they are still observed in parishes which celebrate the Tridentine Mass, as well as in Anglican Ordinariate Catholic parishes, this tradition within the Church has become all but forgotten in the short 53 years since the promulgation of the new calendar. This is a downright shame, as the Ember Days during the year a great times for renewed focus on prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving before God.
Now, we know what most of you are thinking: "what in the heck is an Ember Day?" Very simply, the Ember Days are three-day periods of prayer, fasting, and abstinence that occur four times during the year right around the turn of both the natural seasons and the liturgical seasons .The original observance of these days go back to before Christ during the times of the Roman pagans, who would have ritual observances and celebrations in order to bring divine favor upon them and their crop during the changes of the seasons. The Ember Days fall on the Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays immediately after the third Sunday of Advent (marking the nearing of Christmastide and winter), the First Sunday of Lent (marking the beginning of Lent and Spring), Pentecost Sunday (marking the season after Pentecost and Summer), and the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (marking the latter half of the season after Pentecost and Autumn).
The observance of these days is very ancient in the Roman Church. Pope Leo the Great considered the practice to be of Apostolic origin, and the earliest recorded regulation of the observance of Ember Days by a Pope is during the reign of St. Callixtus I in the early 200s AD. It is a thoroughly Roman Catholic tradition: as the Roman Rite spread throughout the Western Church, so did the observation of the Ember Days.
Some may ask why we should still celebrate the Ember Days. After all, it's a thoroughly antiquated tradition: we're largely not an agrarian society, so there's no need to fast over crops. Not only this, but it seems that it borders on the superstitious: God will give me a better harvest because I'm starving myself for three days? Haven't we moved past that?
No. We have absolutely not moved past these things. Now more than ever, in an age when we have become divorced from the reality of the divine and its impact on the natural order, we need to turn to God and thank Him for the gifts that He has given us, including the abundance of the fruits of the earth and the good weather. We need to remind ourselves that all we have comes from God, and that without Him we are not only dead, but we are nonexistent. This focus on our complete dependence on God and on our own mortality has always been the purpose of fasting.
Not only that, but even if you don't think we need to fast for the crops or for the weather or for anything like that, you should still fast. Fasting in general is something that is of great spiritual benefit and has been lost in the mind of the Church nowadays. What better way to start fasting and to make a better Lent than by abstaining from meat two more times than you normally would have?
We hope that you will take these next few days to dive deeper into prayer and to deny yourself a little, if for nothing else than to enter deeper into the mysteries of Our Lord's suffering.
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