Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is more than a date in Lipce: it turns the village’s religious calendar into a structure for private reckoning and renewed action. For Hanka, the day’s fast, prayer, and reception of ashes lead from painful self-examination to a decisive return to the Boryna farmstead. Elsewhere in the novel, the calendar’s communal rites gather people around marriage, winter worship, reunion, and procession, giving public form to the changing seasons and fortunes of village life.

Hanka’s Ash Wednesday

After visiting the Kłąb family and other friends, Hanka waits several days before going to see Maciej Boryna. On the following Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, she rises without preparing breakfast, dresses as well as she can, leaves the children with Weronka, and sets out. When Antek asks where she is going, she answers that she is going to church for Ash Wednesday, evasively and unwillingly. Her unfinished household task and guarded reply mark the visit as something she means to undertake apart from ordinary domestic routine.

At church, a Low Mass is under way and worshippers fill the nave. Hanka does not join the crowd. She goes instead to an empty, gloomy side aisle and kneels at the altar of the Assumption, where she kisses the ground and prays alone. The contrast between the crowded nave and the secluded aisle gives her a space for a personal encounter with God within the public ceremony. Her suffering comes out as confession: she names her own failings and understands her hardship as punishment, while also pleading for mercy for Antek’s grave sins.

When the Mass ends, worshippers approach the altar rail to receive ashes as the priest recites penitential prayers. Hanka leaves before the rite is over. She goes out feeling strengthened and trusting in God’s help, a change registered in her bearing as well as her intention. Though curious looks meet her, she answers greetings with her head held high and turns boldly, if with some trembling, toward the Boryna farmstead.

From prayer to the farmstead

Hanka’s return gives the day a concrete consequence. She has not set foot at the farmstead for a long time and has previously circled it at a distance. Now she looks with affection at the house, buildings, yard, and frost-bright trees, feeling them as familiar and bound to her as her own flesh and blood. The sense of belonging that had survived her absence becomes visible in her approach to the place. At the porch, the dog Łapa greets her with a joyful leap; Józka, looking out, stops in amazement at the sight of her.

The movement from secluded prayer to the farmstead links inward repentance with outward re-entry. Hanka does not leave church with every conflict resolved: her prayer includes both an acknowledgment of her own faults and an appeal on behalf of Antek. But the day changes her capacity to act. The rite of ashes is followed not by retreat but by her return to the household and land from which she has been separated.

The calendar as village time

Other marked days show how religious and seasonal time organizes collective life in Lipce. On Christmas Eve, activity has been feverish since daybreak, while the surrounding landscape is held in severe frost. The sun shines over snow-covered fields, but the brightness brings no warmth; birds, partridges, and a hare move cautiously through the cold in search of food. The feast day is thus set against winter scarcity and stillness, with household preparations taking place inside a landscape that remains inhospitable.

Wedding customs likewise turn a personal change of status into a shared ritual. Before the wedding procession, Maciej Boryna and Jagna kneel together while Jagna’s mother blesses them with a cross and holy water. Jagna then asks forgiveness and takes leave of those around her; the women embrace her, and the farewell becomes a collective scene of tears. Later, in the wedding celebration, women lead her from the storeroom veiled in a white sheet and seat her on a quilt-covered kneading trough. The staged pursuit and plaintive song make marriage a communal performance as well as a private bond.

The calendar’s public ceremonies also gather people around events that alter the community’s circumstances. When the imprisoned men return, the villagers kneel in a half-circle before Christ on the cross, pray with tears, and receive the priest’s blessing with holy water before rushing to greet their returning relatives. At Corpus Christi, the procession draws the worshippers out behind the priest beneath a red baldachin, with the monstrance, banners, candles, bells, and singing moving around the church. These rites give different moments their own shape: Ash Wednesday concentrates attention on repentance, while procession and reunion make shared devotion visible in the village streets.

Sacred observance and ordinary pressures

The scenes do not make religious time separate from material life. Hanka’s observance occurs amid the demands of feeding children and the strain of her estrangement from Antek; she leaves the children in another’s care and does not make breakfast before going to church. Christmas observance stands amid frost, snow, and the need to prepare for the feast. The calendar’s ceremonies interrupt ordinary tasks, but they do not erase the conditions under which villagers live.

Instead, each marked occasion brings those pressures into a different arrangement. Hanka’s private prayer gives form to remorse and dependence, then steadies her for a return to a place she still regards as home. Wedding ritual places family blessing and communal affection around a change in Jagna’s life. The welcome to the released men turns a long absence into a public reunion, while Corpus Christi carries worship beyond the church into a collective procession. Ash Wednesday’s particular force lies in the passage it gives Hanka: from hesitation and confession to a courageous step back into the life of the farmstead.