Embrace Lent, too: Ashes to ashes
Published 11:34 am Wednesday, March 6, 2019
NEDERLAND — Here’s the choice I was left with, come Fat Tuesday: I’d been the last one to pull the baby from a King Cake at work — I’ve got a knack for that — and should I buy the large one or the small? I pondered that choice at a bakery display.
The smaller King Cake beckoned to my expanding waistline and thinning wallet. But who wants to show up cheap on Fat Tuesday? I put the “fat” into Fat Tuesday. I usually have.
I was introduced to Mardi Gras as a college student in Mobile, Alabama. I’d celebrated for the Carnival Season and relished its parades and parties — Mobile was a robust, sometimes raunchy port — but headed with friends to New Orleans and Bourbon Street on Lundi Gras, in preparation for the Big Day. I ended Lundi Gras and greeted Mardi Gras from the same barstool with a never-ending stream of new friends. What a night. And then some.
Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street is different. Lake Charles and Lafayette and others all think they’ve got this thing right, and for those towns, they likely do. But nothing matches the French Quarter for generating what ought to be public scandal. Or what might be scandal anywhere but in the Big Easy.
It draws people from all over the globe, and strangers usually feel freer to be some alternate version of themselves. I saw things Mama never meant for me to see.
That first Mardi Gras, I saw a man in a chiffon dress, passed out on car hood, shown in all his glory to the world as the car made its slow path through a cheering, French Quarter street mob. There were women motivated in ways I would have thought unimaginable for beads tossed from balconies. People passed out on any patch of green grass. In my New England hometown, we never saw a lot of that — at least not in public.
That’s why Ash Wednesday presents itself not only as an opportunity for reflection but also for relief. I’m too old for this revel, I tell myself. I was too old for this revel 40 years ago.
That’s why I’ll slink toward the back of a church on this day, eager for ashes, hungry for some sense that there’s more to my life and to yours than Carnival Season. There is something more than parades or beads or King Cake. I’ve got 40 days to steer myself toward a familiar reality, which rests in the hope of the Resurrection.
I will be in good company. According to the Texas Almanac, Catholics remain the largest religious body in the state, perhaps due to early Spanish settlers or newer immigrants. Other, liturgical churches embrace this day, too: Presbyterians and Episcopalians and Lutherans. We are all hungry for knowledge that Ash Wednesday delivers in Port Arthur and elsewhere: After weeks of partying, the cold, solemn truth resides in “ashes to ashes” for many people here and across Texas. Life is indeed serious.
That is not grim truth, if you embrace your faith, but comforting, inspiring even, when you consider that your life counts for something. More today than yesterday.
Ken Stickney is editor of The Port Arthur News.
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