Write for God

We live in Dunedin, a small town in Florida that’s not too far from Tampa and St. Petersburg. Each city has festivals and events that are traditional. Unfortunately, our little town is known for its Mardi Gras, which will take over the downtown area tomorrow and leave a trashy mess to clean up on Ash Wednesday.

I’ve never really understood the concept of Fat Tuesday. The Lenten season is a time to pray and meditate on the Passion. It shouldn’t be all about the self-denial of giving up high-calorie treats just to pig out on them on Easter Sunday. Is Christianity such a bitter pill that it requires a raunchy street feast the day before we can begin to think about Lent?

Beads, drinking and excess seem to be how many people celebrate the night before Ash Wednesday in our town and in many areas of the world. I remember seeing the street carnival in Havana once when I was a child and loving the costumes, music and colorful lanterns carried by the dancers. I was too young to really understand Lent the way I do now.

Thousands of party people come to Dunedin’s Mardi Gras, where the festival queen is always a female impersonator from the gay bar downtown. Streets are closed and making it home through detours always makes for a rotten commute on that Tuesday afternoon. The town doesn’t ready its residents for Lent in any meaningful way.

Lent is the season to begin turning to God as we remember the Passion, the Crucifixion and the Easter season. Ash Wednesday’s first reading reminds us of the importance of self-examination:

Even now, says the LORD,
return to me with your whole heart,
with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;
Rend your hearts, not your garments,
and return to the LORD, your God.

We return to the Lord in spirit through our fasting and prayer, not by remembering how drunk we got on Mardi Gras. When we rend our hearts, we open them so that Jesus may enter. The ashes on our foreheads are a sign that we are dust and to dust we shall return. At a parish where I was a Eucharistic minister, we used “Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel,” too. It always seemed a more direct link to the meaning of Lent.

As we anticipate Lent, we would do well to consider it a gift to have the opportunity to move closer to God rather than turning the eve of Ash Wednesday into a drunken street party that gets rowdier every year.