A Pastor’s Thoughts

By Fr. Jim Muscatella, Blessed Trinity and St. Patrick’s Parishes —

“Wait, there’s really a day you call Fat Tuesday?” The young man looked at me from across the dining room table, his eyes wide with a bewildered smirk. We were in the middle of a Catechism lesson, and mentioning the colorful title of that last weekday before Lent saw the easy progression of our conversation come to a screeching halt.

Next came a mention of “Mardi Gras,” which he was certainly familiar with, and our Catechism class was certainly getting carried away – here was his priest, his supposedly pious instructor and guide. For nearly a year, he had eagerly prepared for the holy occasion of his Baptism, the moment when (so this priest had told him) Christ Himself would meet him in those waters to wash away his sins amidst the lighted candles of the great celebration of the Easter Vigil. We were rapidly approaching Lent, and we might have been talking about the austerities of fasting and meatless Fridays. Perhaps the solemn invocation “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return!” might have sounded as a somber reproach from his priest that afternoon – he would certainly hear those words pronounced again and again during the solemn procession of the faithful on Ash Wednesday. 

Instead, here was his priest, first calling a weekday “portly,” and then making recourse to a Cajun carnival. 

The parades of Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, are well worth talking about, however – even catechism-worthy. In the beginning of all things, if Sacred Scripture is to be taken seriously, God the Father inaugurated His creation with a grand procession. 

In the first pages of our Bibles, God calls into the dark nothingness to bring wonderful fullness into splendid existence. First creating the sky, the waters, and the lands, the Creator of all things in turn delighted to fill each with the teeming lights of the stars and multitudes of living plants and animals – “While the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (Job 38:7).

Then God calls every creature to march magnificently before Adam – he calls out with delight every bird and beast by name, like a child alongside His Father calling out every troop and truck as they appear in a parade. God had taken us to His side so that we might wonder and realize that we are made like Him, by Him, to share in the glory of all things with Him. Our first calling, and our most essential calling, is to be alongside Him.

But in sin, things indeed got carried away – or, more precisely, we did. The God who had worked such wonders had shown His care and concern; the world and all creation were (and are) offered as a great display of His love for our sake. In our pride, however, we dismissively grasped at finding our own way. We disregarded the rhythm and timbre of all creation as it marched by us. We had thought ourselves too good for the ground from which we sprang. We had broken the harmony of creation, our God-given gift and the very ground beneath us, and had fallen out of step with our Creator.

But He has never forgotten us. When we give up the good things of creation (and more specifically, our harmful ways of relating to them) during the season of Lent, we return to the “dust” of our creation to find our footing again. Recognizing that we have lost sight of our Father in the crowd we’ve wandered into, we cry out to Him in prayer. As we reach out to give alms to our needy brothers and sisters, we extend our hands out to Him. Every good work done sincerely during Lent is grounded in Hope – that the God who made us has truly sent His own Son, Jesus Christ, as our brother to save us. Walking into the midst of our tumult on pierced feet, He extends wounded hands to walk alongside us through the chaos and din – because the Father who began all things with a parade is waiting for us at the table He’s prepared, and we who have fasted are called, every Sunday, to His Easter feast.