Put the Shrove back in Tuesday!

Put the Shrove back in Tuesday! February 28, 2017

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I spent a few minutes yesterday wandering around online to see what the ordinary internet purveyor had to say about Shrove Tuesday. When you live in a world that was formed and shaped to its very roots by the rhythms and cycles of a particular religion, in this case Christianity, you might expect some vestigial remnants of that long abandoned way. And surely, Mardi Gras, or, as I found the English now call it, Pancake Day, is one of them. I looked at pictures of British school children in the throes of pancake racing, and then spent only thirty seconds looking at a Mardi Gras Carnival. These important traditions seem to be up to level of St. Patrick’s Day here–another thrilling remanent of a bygone era.

Everyone, or almost everyone, likes a party and a good time. Time to throw off the cares of life’s drudgery and eat pancakes and dance! And maybe drink, just a little, or maybe a lot too much. Everyone needs to let down their hair and just let a lot of it all hang out. So saith the prevailing winds of the doctrine of this age.

But the fat of Fat Tuesday, without the ash of Ash Wednesday, is not nearly as rich as it might be. This is true of every single human experience. Without the suffering and darkness of the valley, the light breaking forth over the tops of the mountain is not as glorious as it could be. This is true but we never want it to be.

The human person, even me, wants to skip the valley and the cross and the fast. I want sweetness and light. I want sunshine and unicorns. I want a single day that goes on without Any Bad Thing inserting itself into my carefully curated reality.

Every Monday I drive one of my children across town so that she can twist herself into the shapes of pretzels and arches and have the best time of her week. It’s a long drive, for me anyway. She likes it though. It’s the one time she can, without interruption, enumerate the relative goodness or badness of the previous seven days. “I thought Wednesday was going to be good,” she’ll say, “because I made an egg for breakfast and got all my school work done by lunchtime. But then my brother was slow in the kitchen and we took all day to do the dishes and everyone was mean to me after that.” She keeps mental copies of all the ways each day was ruined, day by day by day.

And she’s right. Every day is ruined in some small way. There is no such thing as a perfect day, unmarred by either irritation or sorrow. And yet we cling, bitterly in her case, to the idea that there should be. We should be happy All The Time. Every day should be pancakes and carnival.

Whereas God, since that first dark wretched morning when Adam and Eve found themselves shut out of the Garden, the place where every day had been a Friday or whatever that book or song says, insists that we go through the valley of the shadow of death. ‘You have to go there,’ he says in hundreds of different way, breaking in on our happiness with the cruel, impossible reality that sorrow is necessary before joy.

He moves us inexorably towards the cross, one by one, and towards death, even as we do everything we can to avoid it. There are many reasons the church has failed in the modern age–failed to be a compelling option among the cacophony of religious practices crowding together in every bookstore and on every phone screen–but one of the biggest, I think, is that the Christian has to face the cross. We are not allowed to just eat pancakes and drink sangria all the time. We have to put the Shrove back into Tuesday and confess the bitter and real taste of sin. To be a Christian is to go ahead and walk through the valley of the shadow of death, hoping that light will break through on the other side, knowing that joy is promised, but not being able to see it, and not rushing to grab it before it’s time.

When you skip the valley, when you skip the cross, all you have is a hangover and a bin of old photos of what you are sure was a better time. You have nostalgia, and a chasing after the future. This is where we are as a culture. No bad thing can come in along the margins, let alone into the center of the frame, because we have got to have happiness. Must. There is no other way.

But the insistence on happiness without suffering doesn’t actually mean you get to be happy. The headlong and unstudied pursuit of happiness leaves you with the bitterness of disappointment, with ashes in the mouth, with regrets and another trudge up the mountain, carefully skirting along the edges of the valley, to get the feeling back. The hangover, which may feel like the shadow of death, is not quite the same thing. It can be treated, medicated, endured for a few hours, and then it goes away in time for the party to kick back into gear. Except that when the party is the main thing, and the only thing, and the first thing, and the last thing, after a while the hangover takes over–the whole culture reeling from stupor and disappointment.

Surely we can wake up in the west and see that that way isn’t working. Every day isn’t Friday. One more drink won’t make it all better.

Why not try the cross? It’s right there. If you live it up big tonight there will still be time tomorrow morning to drag yourself from the comfort of your bed and go face the truth–that when you go through the valley of the shadow of death, when you stand there with the ash smeared across your brow, when you face the darkness, the joy, the light, the life is infinitely sweeter and more intense than it would otherwise have been. Every day isn’t Friday because Friday, even if you have shut the windows of your soul, is still the Day of Death. Why would you want to stick there, avoiding that cross up on a hill? Even for a party? Why not go out and look at the cross? Consider what it is and who died there. And then go weep through the night. Endure for a night. Because Sunday is the day of resurrection, joy comes on that day, even in the small hours of the morning. An intense, relief laden joy, a joy you would never had known had you not faced the darkness.

A Blessed Shrove Tuesday to you!


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