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Shrove Tuesday and Mardi Gras by The Rev. Hartshorn Murphy "Shrove Tuesday: the day immediately preceding Ash Wednesday, so named from the `shriving', i.e. confession and absolution, of the faithful on that day." Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. In Jewish tradition, a season of preparation often preceded major celebrations. As the earliest Christians were Jews, it was natural that a season of preparation would be adopted prior to the celebration of the chief feast of Easter. The season of Lent (from the Anglo-Saxon word for spring - lengthening) is a season of 40 days of preparation before Easter, marked by reflection and prayer and fasting. Over time, the custom emerged of emphasizing the contrast between Lenten time and ordinary time by a celebration of excess just prior to Lent. In English church tradition, the day before the beginning of Lent was celebrated with the eating of pancakes. The purpose was to use up the leaven in the house - especially butter and rich creams - to avoid the temptation of eating those foods during the Lenten fast. In other cultures, the day was marked with a "Mardi Gras," a French term which means literally "fat Tuesday" and which was observed by the parading of a fat ox through the streets of Paris on this day before Ash Wednesday. In this way, any gala celebration with festive foods is a fit observance. In her book To Dance with God, Gertrud Mueller Nelson reflects on the deeper impulse behind Mardi Gras or as it is known in some places: Carnival. "There is a dreamlike place that tradition offers that holds a wild pageantry of the dark, unknown elements of the soul: Carnival. Carnival precedes any efforts we might make at dying by allowing us to live in a compensatory period, briefly, in a kind of recklessness and daring make-believe way. Throughout history, in every part of the world, civilized societies recognized the need to return for a brief moment to chaos. For every step into light and consciousness that a society is able to make, it must remember and honor what is dark and messy and disorganized and iconoclastic just the other side of our human consciousness. Carnival sets free for a time our negative, irrational and unacceptable aspects and, by reminding ourselves of the dark and steamy side of our human nature, gives warning what global disasters the unconscious is able to create if left separate from our conscious selves. But through the ceremonies of its ritual action, it also allows us to recognize the vulnerable beauty of our human condition. Carnival is the ritual hint at what lies behind our desire for the Holy. The unacceptable impulses in our human nature insist on being admitted into our awareness. Wherever an excess of one quality has been built to a towering height the impulse is to compensate and bring to bear its opposite, like a small child who has, with great effort and concentration, built a block tower; he admires it for a moment but is then compelled to knock the whole creation over with a glee surprisingly destructive for his earlier effort. Like messing up a sand castle so that we can start anew or like dumping out all the drawers before sorting and ordering them, Carnival offers compensation to the ordering of Lent…Anarchy and rebellion hide not only in the hearts of the "youth of today" but in all our hearts and can only be honored safety in ritual. Carnival, for all its look of madness and its possible danger, is the wish to honor all that wells up from the forgotten level of our souls which, on every other day of the year we would rather not look at or recognize but which does need a period of consideration and celebration." A priority for our church community this year is the restoration of our kitchen as a usable space. At one time, when there was a parish day school on site, the kitchen prepared meals for the whole school community each day. When the school closed and the space was leased to Crossroads, the kitchen fell into disuse and neglect. Although our needs today are quite different than the church community of the 1950's and 1960's, nevertheless, a working kitchen is a necessity to sustain a growing church community. For this reason, we will celebrate the secular feast of Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras with a parish community celebration beginning with a silent auction on Sunday, Feb. 22 and concluding with a dinner on Tuesday night, February 24. At the end of the dinner, we will go in procession to the sanctuary and symbolically "bury the alleluia" - that great shout of triumph and celebration will not be heard in our community until the Great Vigil of Easter - and then leave the church in absolute silence only to return the next day, Ash Wednesday, and receive on our faces the symbol of our own deaths in place of the symbols of life we wore the night before in the carnival masks of Mardi Gras. The contrast of celebration and penitence, of noise and quiet, of light and darkness, of life and death is a powerful teaching moment for our psyches which needs, as Gertrud Nelson observes, a balance of order and chaos. Mardi Gras, our ritual chaos, happens on Tuesday, Feb. 24th, 6-8:30 p.m. Dinner tickets are $10 for adults and youth 12 and older, $5.00 for kids 5-12 and free for little ones under the age of 5. Childcare will also be available as needed by sign up. Tickets are available in the St. Augustine Books by-the-Sea on Sundays.
Copyright © 2004 St. Augustine by-the-Sea
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