Fat Tuesday Thoughts: Mardi Gras 1

This day is Mardi Gras, Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. In many places, especially in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and New Orleans in USA, there will again be lavish parades and sensuous display of sweat-soaked bodies and gyrating dancers on huge, colorful and expensive floats greeting carousing revelers that line up the streets. There would again be partying and overflow of drinks and feastings, and indulgences of every kind and persuasion. The whole affair could appear at first as just some kind of harmless fun. Down with the prudes organizers and fans would even say.

But what does Mardi Gras really mean for us? Why of all the other days in the year would we choose the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday to hold such revelry when we practically have the whole year for our feasts and banquets?

To merely think of Mardi Gras this way is to completely miss the point. To regard Mardi Gras in this manner is to further impoverish our minds and hearts.

Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday for us is not simply a day of unabated intoxications. It something else; it is something more. It is an opportunity for us to sit down for a while in silence and see just how much we have fattened ourselves with all manners of selfish pursuits, and emaciate ourselves in the process by being deprived of the real source of our nourishment. Fat Tuesday is an indictment at how we have fattened ourselves to be sacrificed on the altars of our idols and false gods, only to realize later the absurdity and tragedy of it all. Fat Tuesday is an expose of the sham comforts and fleeting satisfaction that the world dangles to our senses. Fat Tuesday is about spiritual junk food overload alert. Fat Tuesday is a wakeup call.

Louder than the groans of the glutton’s stomach, shriller than the shrieks of the most seasoned epicurean party animal, Fat Tuesday’s reminder rouses us from our apathy and laziness today, and invites, nay, challenges us to read the label on the packages of our daily fare and see if we truly are getting the real deal at spiritually healthy living.