Party Time? Maybe Not

Lent is just around the corner. This weekend I’ll be attending a Mardi Gras celebration, a nice little Gala for the local Habitat for Humanity board. The will be plenty of purple and green and gold beads, and some beautiful masks, but happily the debauchery and excess often associated with the holiday will be missing. Not that I want it, just the observation that in the increasingly secular world in which we live, yet another religious tradition gets turned around and becomes a caricature of itself.

Excess rules the day. It would be easier to accept if there was a real effort to pursue the 40 days of Lent with a sense of sacrifice and deprivation, but we all know Lent has nothing to do with any of these parties.

It does, however, remind me of my own faith journey, and how I look at and embrace the lenten season. Long ago as a child, the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday was a mini-mardi gras for my friends and me. We’d gorge on chocolate or coke until we were sick, as if we could stockpile the pleasure of those treats, and then bemoan our existence until Easter, when we’d gorge again, after a supposed (and more often than not, failed) period of sacrifice.

As I matured, I was able to see the season a bit more clearly. Spiritual preparation replaced the easy, and easy to break, sacrifice of giving up a favorite food. I started, instead, to give up bad habits and replace them with good ones. Things that made me weak spiritually, replaced by spiritually healthy alternatives. The idea of course, is to become a better person, and maintain those spiritually healthy habits.

It’s a good opportunity to improve prayer life. Instead of giving up chocolate, only to resume eating it on Easter, why not learn to meditate on the rosary? Instead of denying yourself McDonald’s, why not attend a daily mass on a day you ordinarily wouldn’t? Stretch yourself spiritually. Not only is there a physical sacrifice involved, but it will be a habit after 40 days, and way better for you than the stomach ache you’ll surely have on Easter Sunday.