Mardis Gras

Today is the last day before the 40 days of Lent.

Mardi Gras caps off a weeklong celebration known as Carnival. It's a period of revelry known for music, partying and alcohol that flows like water. Amid all the hoopla and pageantry of the floats in New Orleans it can be easy to forget that Mardi Gras in its roots is a religious celebration tied into Ash Wednesday tomorrow.

The cynic might look at the Mardi Gras celebration as an attempt by the faithful to squeeze in as much last-minute fun and debauchery as possible. After this, it's off to the confessional and time to put on an appropriately penitent show to satisfy the sad-sack priests during Lent.

This misses the point. While God surely does want us to keep ourselves free of wrongdoing, fun and pleasure were God's idea. It was God who showed humanity how to make wine and rum and their cousins. It was God who gave us music and friends. It was God who invented sex and made having it his first commandment.

People might overdo it getting drunk on Bourbon Street, but Mardi Gras falls into a grand tradition of festivals rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures. Celebrations of spring. Celebrations of fall. New Years celebrations. Private parties. National parties. "They tried to kill us, but we're still here and they're not" parties.

There are common threads running through all of them. Eat. Drink. Let your hair down. Jesus' first miracle involved giving people at a wedding better wine than anything they'd had so far. There's even an entire book of the Bible about the joys of sex.

Enjoy yourself, God tells us. Live a little.

Lent begins Wednesday. It's a 40-day period that leads up to the events of Good Friday, when Christians of all stripes traditionally mark the Crucifixion. It's a liturgical marker of the time between when first Jesus and then his disciples realized that things were not going to go the way they had first hoped, and when things got as absolutely bad as they possibly could.

Carnival is a time for wine and celebration, a season for living large and loving life for all that it gives us. Mardi Gras marks the end of that season.

Tonight is the night we celebrate. It is the last bottle, the last cup, the last drink we will have before we find that there are ashes in our wine.