The Meaning of Mardi Gras

By Barb Levy

I’m writing this on Mardi Gras, the day before the season of Lent begins. Mardi Gras means Fat Tuesday in French, and evidently comes from the tradition of slaughtering and feasting upon a fattened calf on the last day of Carnival. Carnival comes from the Latin words carne vale, meaning “farewell to the flesh.” People the world over take the opportunity to live it up, perhaps getting drunk or acting outrageous, before putting on their sackcloth and ashes and giving up something for Lent.

Of course, another word containing carne is incarnation, which literally means embodied in flesh.

During my five months as a catechumen, including my first Lent, I remember our beloved rector Fr. Peter Moore telling us that “Lent is not a self-improvement program.” What I took him to mean was that the meaning of Lent is not found in fasting from chocolate or alcohol, talking about our sacrifice for forty days, wearing our furrowed brows in public, but rather entering with Christ into the wilderness, embracing and learning from life’s temptations, and taking up our own crosses in daily life. This was preparation for Holy Week and Easter, not getting on the scale at the end of forty days.

I just re-read some of the St. Paul’s blog postings from last year, and found Fr. Torvend’s description of “the social context in which the practice of fasting emerged among Christians” very insightful. The post was entitled Why Fast, Who Cares?:

“When Lent emerged in the agrarian populations of western and eastern Europe, the practice of fasting was rooted in human necessity. The warming weather of spring would spoil foods kept in storage. Thus, it was important to eat the foods before they were no longer edible. At the same time, late winter and early spring are the birthing season for herds of animals. By refusing to eat beef, lamb, and pork, Christians helped the next generation of animals survive and so replenish the herd.

“But of course this form of fasting, rooted in the desire for human and animal survival, was shot through with biblical overtones. Christians saw themselves in solidarity with Noah and all the animals saved in the ark as they refused to eat animals during Lent, their fasting a gesture toward a new creation. And they were well aware of the Jewish and Christian practice of fasting—but fasting in order to set aside food for those who were chronically hungry. In other words, fasting allowed one to save food or money that could be given to the poor. … Yes, fasting focused on the hungry poor, not on simply ‘giving up something’ because ‘that’s what we do in Lent’ or refraining from delectable foods because it makes us pleasing to God or is simply a test of our endurance.”

So how might words and traditions rooted in flesh, atonement, sharing with those less fortunate, and taking care of creation inform our Lenten discipline?

Obviously giving up meat, or eating more meatless meals, is no longer a necessity in the sense of replenishing the herd. But animal agriculture in our day and age, though mostly hidden from view, has gone to the opposite extreme: 10 billion animals are killed each year in the United States—99% of them on factory farms where they undergo extreme suffering and degradation that would be illegal if it were done to our pets. And the degradation to our earth is closely tied with factory farming as well.

A Lenten discipline can include some degree of fasting from these horrors—eating more humanely by reflecting on how and what we consume and making more compassionate choices. This doesn’t need to be all or nothing. For instance, there is currently a movement called Meatless Mondays. Or, others eat vegan until dinner time. Learning more about the realities of the food industry and then choosing to eat what is better for us and for the environment (let alone animals) instead of eating something because it tastes good and is easy to come by is a challenging daily discipline.

Last year a woman who was preparing for baptism at St. Paul’s told me that in preparation for taking her baptismal vows, which include renouncing “the evil powers of the world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God,” she was becoming a vegetarian.

She knew that her interpretation was not typical, but felt that in knowing about the horrors of factory farming she could no longer partake in meat eating after taking those vows. She reached out to me because she knew I was a vegetarian. I was inspired by her perspective and her determination.

And it had just been dawning on me, after 30 years as a vegetarian and 17 as a Christian, how the two are connected.

This Lent, I offer these thoughts not to judge or sound self-righteous, but to urge us as a community to make this place a better world not just for one another, but for all God’s creatures.

“Animals are God's creatures, not human property, nor utilities, nor resources, nor commodities, but precious beings in God's sight. ... Christians whose eyes are fixed on the awfulness of crucifixion are in a special position to understand the awfulness of innocent suffering. The Cross of Christ is God's absolute identification with the weak, the powerless, and the vulnerable, but most of all with unprotected, undefended, innocent suffering.”
—Rev. Andrew Linzey, Anglican theologian

More links of interest:
Episcopal Network for Animal Welfare
Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians
Humane Society—Lent: Planning Your Menu

Barb Levy is not 100% anything, but tries to eat consciously. She welcomes your thoughts, and offers more of her own on her healthnik website.

Life at Sea Can be Hazardous

By Robin Jones

A couple of Sundays ago at St. Paul’s we baptized three kids—the narthex did somewhat resemble the YMCA pool for a few minutes. Mother Melissa’s sermon centered that day around a discussion she had had with various members of the parish about whether baptismal water should be warm or cold. Now, be assured, at St. Paul’s it’s always going to be warm, for all kinds of good reasons, but among the notions that came from those discussions and which found its way into the text of the homily was that of the water being warm as evoking the waters of the womb, or the warmth of the baptismal water representing the gentle caress of God, for just a couple of examples.

I think I was in on one of those vesting room conversations, and those in the parish who are acquainted with me know that I spent many chapters of my life as “Satan’s Cabana Boy,” so it came easy for me to play Devil’s Advocate and suggest the water be cold, because, as I put it, “the person baptized needs to be reminded that ‘life at sea can be hazardous.’” Well, naturally, that smart-alecky seeming non sequitur didn’t get replayed in the sermon, but I stand by what I said.

I don’t remember my first baptism, but I remember my second: I was on a Navy cruiser bound for Australia as I approached my 22nd birthday. I remember bloodying my knees on the hot main deck to have a mop-headed King Neptune order cold seawater poured over me, declaring in a round-toned alcohol-sodden gravel that I was no longer a “’wog” but a Son of Neptune. Most of humanity still resides in the northern hemisphere, and there is still, even in the 20th and 21st centuries, a mystique to crossing the Equator. Young sailors are always patently aware of the mass of ocean surrounding them that diminishes the proportion of the floating arks on which they live and labor, and the ever-present immediacies of drowning and dehydration, sharks and tsunamis make them cling to such life rafts of camaraderie and tradition as ceremonies of crossing really an imaginary line around the waist of a planet, lonely for its uniqueness in precipitating enough water to harbor life. Life at sea can be hazardous, and there is safety in being part of a crew.

I won’t tell you the sea story of how I returned to the Church after an extended odyssey of self-exile, because when I do, people seem to no longer suffer insomnia, but I will tell you that I when I made the decision to do so, it wasn’t the proverbial lifting of a weight off my shoulders. Nooo, I know exactly why I came back—but the reason is utterly illogical because I at that moment had for so long worn my loneliness, cynicism, and profane rascally-ness like comfortable sneakers, and coming back to the church meant that I was scrawling my signature to all the attendant responsibilities of feeling, and caring for other people. It was more like shouldering my end of a massive canoe for a long portage. And over these last ten years, when I have winced at the sense of my heart about to explode for that feeling of belonging that comes definitely with every Christmas Eve and Easter, and when I think about it, every day; when I have stepped solemnly in funerals and said good by to souls cast to eternity, people whose lives I would neither have intersected with nor given a second thought to had I not returned to the Church, and for whose loss I may feel so alone again, I do sometimes find myself leaning at the rail and looking longingly over the horizon for that desert island of cynical self-containment.

But I’m a member of the crew nowadays, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. To the three pollywogs last week I say “Welcome aboard.” Welcome to the crew. Welcome to being a Human Being. And remember, life at sea can be hazardous.


Robin Jones is an altar server at St. Paul’s.

Journeys of Faith: Coming to St. Paul's from a Jewish Background

by Barb Levy
I grew up as a secular Jew, simply defined as “a person of Jewish heritage, but not observant of Judaism.” My mother always said that there were four types of Jews: orthodox, conservative, reform, and unaffiliated. We were unaffiliated Jews. But even though I didn’t study the 613 commandments, my Jewish identity was not simple to define:

• My father’s mother spoke Yiddish and witnessed one of the Kishinev pogroms before fleeing to America. (The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia [were] a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Russian Easter.)
• Some of my Jewish friends felt I was “not really a Jew,” since I didn’t go to Hebrew School or have a Bat Mitzvah.
• My father was a navigator in WWII; Jews were not allowed to be pilots.
• He and my mother were both turned down for jobs because they were Jewish.
• A family member on my mother’s side became a Christian and was never spoken of again.
• Most of my family’s friends were Jewish. They were passionate, political, intellectual, caring, and funny.
  

My idea of a Christian was an amalgam of a televangelist, Jehovah’s Witness, Anita Bryant, and the WASPs at my prep school. (A WASP was, to me, a privileged white person who could trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower, or to some country of fair-skinned people. I never would have guessed that I would spend almost every Sunday with Anglicans!)

I am often asked, when I say I am an Episcopalian from a Jewish background, ‘But were you a religious Jew?’ as if becoming a Christian is not such a big deal if you aren’t leaving the religion of your people. On the contrary, reactions I’ve had from relatives and friends (whether Jewish, feminist, or both) made coming out as a lesbian seem like a picnic.

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Notwithstanding the reactions of those around me I felt drawn, with the help of clergy and spiritual friends (who later became sponsors) at St. Paul's, to wrestle with my many intellectual, historical, and emotional barriers to Christianity. I began to question, resist, surrender, and journey—at my own pace—amid the stumbling blocks.

I witnessed other adult baptisms, endured a long catachumenate, and was fully immersed in baptism at the 1992 Easter vigil. To this day the memory of my baptism, along with the extraordinary music, liturgy, and breathtaking sense of awe and mystery that can be experienced at St. Paul’s on any Sunday, keeps me coming back to a sacred home I never imagined I would enter. St. Paul’s, with its remarkable assortment of family members and customs is a profoundly blessed community.

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Christianity is still rife with anti-Semitism, and the patriarchal language and images of God still trip me up. I still struggle with split identities. When the sign of the cross is made on my forehead with ashes or anointing oil, it traces the crosses carved into the foreheads of Jews during pogroms. I can’t hear the lyrics “keep them from the strangers’ ways” from Fiddler on the Roof without desperate sadness.

But somehow when I close my eyes and pray, bow, kneel, genuflect, and participate in the Eucharist, I know that my prayers are rising upon clouds of incense or wings of song to the same One Holy God beyond definition who loves us all beyond our comprehension.

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Lent (which I describe as “a six week Yom Kippur”) is almost upon us. During these forty days in the wilderness, we recall Jesus’ temptations and agony, act out the disciples’ fear, denial, and betrayal, watch or sleep in the Garden of Gethsemane, and ultimately experience another wondrous Easter. In my own way, I will connect once more to first-century Jewish Christians, whose roots lie tangled somewhere with my own.

This is a place like no other. Thanks be to God!

Barb Levy is webmaster at St. Paul's, and owner of Stepping Stone Graphics. Her blog entry on Gay Pride and the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul may be found here.