Bourbon Street is an interesting place to be after Midnight in the first hours of Ash Wednesday morning. As the clock strikes midnight, police on horseback clear the quarter. As the raucous clamor of carnival celebration ceases, there is an almost eeriness to the atmosphere. Sometimes knee-deep trash is piled up in the streets, and there are always a few lonesome revelers straggling in the roadway. The street sweeper eventually comes through and most of the remnants of the great celebration is swept away. In the stillness, there is both the echo of the laughter and music of the carnival now ended as well as the echo of somewhat of an emptiness that is not so much depressing as beaconing. You may feel as if you are standing at a crossings that although is marked seasonally on an annual basis, it sort of feels like something even more familiar, something that is experienced perhaps on a less grand scale almost daily in our lives (the truth of this is proportional to the level of inebriation).
Joyous laughter in celebration of life always has the potential to lead to some type of reflection on life itself, in all its mystery. Conversely, when we sometimes reflect on the experiences of life, both pleasant and difficult, we can be led directly into a heart-set of appreciation and celebration. It’s a way of marking the pattern of our lives so that we can name and celebrate experiences in our lives without perhaps the judgments that we so quickly tend to make.
There can be a sense of presence in the Mardi Gras season that goes deeper than bodily drunkenness, gluttony, and debauchery. This “presence” can speak to the heart in a resonant way that can even serve to express our shared experiences as humans. This is not the attitude of “all we have to do is party in order to forget our anxieties, differences and problems.” The season does though provide a celebratory context within which we can express and experience our lives together in a way that perhaps our everyday lives do not afford. There is a sense of abundance that masquerades in Mardi Gras. Yet this hidden fullness needs another season to fully unmask itself. And then comes Lent…
Many times we tend to look at the Lenten season as the “reparation” of all the “sins” of the Carnival season. We tell ourselves, “O.K., Mardi Gras is over, now it’s time to get serious” about the goals that we may have in terms of self-improvement and spiritual practices. I believe there is much more to season of Lent than that. Inasmuch as it is a “return” to God and our true selves, this return is not in opposition to our “Mardi Gras” lives. The austerity measures that we may take during Lent can be helpful in “stilling” our minds and bodies to listen more deeply to God’s activity in our lives, but the season itself is perhaps a more complimentary way of reflecting on how our lives are marked by the paradox of joy and pain, disappointment and hope, tears and laughter. No matter how much we may plan otherwise, our lives are impacted by all of this. Lent can help us to listen to something deeper than our preconceived notions about life and death. There is this echoing presence deep down in our heart, where God is saying, as Paul tells the Corinthians in today’s epistle:
“Behold, now is a very acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation. 2 COR 5: 20–6:2
Just as Mardi Gras invites us to celebrate the “now” of life, Lent invites us to accept NOW in another – though not necessarily oppositional – way. The invitation is to accept that God is coming to us right now. And when we accept this we are “carried” and “healed” and loved! This is the meaning of salvation. Indeed, this is the truest meaning of the Incarnation. As the body of Christ, we have the capacity to receive and give the preciousness of the present now to each other. When we recognize God, we can accept God, in the myriad ways that He/She is coming to us – our world, our joys, our sorrows, our pains, our hopes, our brothers and our sisters!
Lent is not Spring for no reason. It is a season of newness that may involve practices that “disengage” us from patterns of distraction (sin) that prohibit us from going deeper into the Heart of God. We disengage in order to engage in a deeper relationship. Whatever we choose to “fast” from or “add to” our lives during the season of Lent, the hope is that we will become postured for Listening…deep listening.
Could we say then that Lent is a season for Listening? Not just a listening that involves paying attention, but a deep listening that reaches down into our soul and makes way for that “echo” to resound. That same echo that we can hear from the abandoned Mardi Gras Streets on the dawn of Ash Wednesday. It is the echo from all directions that is coming straight from the Heart of God. God calls us to Listen NOW in everything and everyone. And that yearning that we feel as we go through life is exactly our own hearts being drawn into God’s deep longing for us! The yearning echoes in our being, and if we attend to it and Listen, we can respond in ways that allow transformation in our lives and in the world.
Paul tells the Corinthians:
“We are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us.”
Paul is convicted that Christ is truly in us, that God dwells within our hearts, appealing to us, drawing us into the infinite Love, and appealing through us, opening up the love relationship to everyone else. In Lent, we try to choose practices that hopefully will enable us to Listen to the Love welling up from within the members of the Body of Christ. This is enlightenment, and indeed already Easter, though we won’t liturgically celebrate it for 40 days now.
The frolics of Mardi Gras can be seen as an aspect of life that is not opposed to the paschal or Easter pattern. In a way, the celebration of the comedy and tragedy of life that we find in Mardi Gras can be a healthy touchstone for processing the mystery of life as we experience it. We need to be able to parade our hopes and anxieties and even dress them up for fun. The season of Lent follows this by drawing the oftentimes “oppositional” aspects of life that we experience into a fuller Whole that in some way connects the Ashes of Wednesday with the Palms of Sunday (I have always found it so profound that the palms from the prior Lent are burned to make the ashes for the following year’s Ash Wednesday).
In Lent, we can learn to listen to Christ, In Christ, by listening to God in each other NOW. This simply means to Listen in Love, which means becoming mesmerized by the echo of God’s love yearning in all of us. This echo resounds all the more when we allow it to echo through us. And when the echo resounds deeply in us, that vibration allows us to let go of the masks of our judgments that we hide behind.
My prayer is that we each and all together find that which allows us to listen in love and healing to the echo of God’s Infinite Love yearning for us to be transformed within its NOW!
Peace
Thomas
The soul is the delicate yet durable cloth woven and laced together in loving pattern by the merciful strokes of God’s Passings…
And the sheen of our soul is the ever-glowing awareness we have of this sacred-stitched fabric.