I'll Give You These Beads if You Show Me Your Pancakes

It is with incredible bemusement that I find myself every Fat Tuesday in one Church Hall or another, eating pancakes. It is probably the Church tradition I find the most bizarre. A virgin birth I can believe in, on a good day, for all things are possible with God. The belief that Christ was crucified and rose from the dead and that it means something important? I can buy that. But the idea that we would gather the night before one of the most somber Church services of the year to eat flapjacks? Come on.

For years I wondered why we did this. There, is after all, no commandment that "Thou shalt eat Pancakes". Jesus did not enjoy pancakes at the last supper (though I suppose he did have a passover meal of unleavened bread...but he certainly did not have syrup, or butter, or delicious, devilish bacon). I eventually settled on the idea that it was the Church's lame way to try to keep people from enjoying a more "traditional" Mardi Gras. But that didn't make much sense; in a battle between blueberry blintzes and beer, beads, and debauchery the later usually holds forth, and if you spend anytime with a Lutheran choir you will realize that keeping people from enjoying life is low on the list of mainline protestant priorities.

I eventually read online that historically people made pancakes and things like them on Fat Tuesday because they were trying to get rid of all the fatty rich foods they had before the fasting season of lent. But that doesn't make a lot of sense today, when right after Ash Wednesday services I can go down to the IHOP and eat a giant friggin plate of pancakes and no one will give me a second glance (provided I washed all that ash off of my forehead). It seems like its just another crazy thing we do because "it's what we've always done."

But is it really that crazy?

I am in a Lutheran Church, but our pastor is practically a Jesuit, and as a consequence a real effort is made to make Lent mean something. You get a sense of that if you come to the Ash Wednesday service, where the altar is draped in black and you are forced to contemplate the dust into which, one day, you will return. It's the one day in the liturgical year where all that stuff about everlasting life (whatever that means) is forgotten, and Christians are allowed to think about death without the safety net of Jesus in place. In that way, maybe Fat Tuesday is almost a metaphor for the last day of our lives.

So if you were given one night in which to live, if you knew that tomorrow a priest would sprinkle some ash on your forehead and you would be dead, how would you spend it? Some of us may choose to go out and party all night. But I'll bet a lot of us would also rather spend it quietly with family and friends, basking in love and fellowship as night turns to day and life waxes into death.

Historical explanations aside, I like to think that maybe that's why some of us gather in the Church Hall every year to eat pancakes served by whatever men's group has emerged the strongest after a brutal struggle for survival at our respective religious establishments. Yes, tonight we eat pancakes, but we will also see good friends and be surrounded by the Church family that so many of us rely upon to get by, week by week, as we grapple with the mysteries of faith and of life.

So Happy Mardi Gras! Eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow we (figuratively) die.