Looking Back at Mardi Gras 2010

The past two weeks have been a bit of a blur.  The Saints won the Super Bowl, and then Mardi Gras went into full swing.  It’s what has been known as “Lombardi Gras.”  I have been working for the greatest radio station in the universe, WWOZ 90.7 FM New Orleans, who hired me to help them with their website.  What makes this station so great is that their show hosts are all volunteers, and there is no mandated playlist for them to follow.  Every song is hand picked by the individual show host – the way that radio started and the way that it should be.  I was able to get some great video and photos of Mardi Gras and the celebration of the Saints’ victory, including this narrative below:

What a night!

Now it is Lent.  It sounds odd, but I like Lent.  It gives me a chance to be more reflective, to slow down, and to allow God to draw nearer.  What I hope to uncover by the time Easter rolls around is more of my true, purer self.  A lot of this has to do with being more disciplined in what I eat, drink, and consume to remove physical layers of myself, but it also has to do with peeling off the layers of selfishness and impatience and the language that I use in my day-to-day living.  This comes with prayer and self-sacrifice and doing things that take me out of my own comfort zone for the sake of the comfort of others.

If I like Lent, then why not be that way all of the time?  Well, life isn’t just about inwardness; we have to have time for outward joy and expressiveness too.  What the liturgical calendar does (Lent being one of the seasons) is help create a life that mirrors a beautiful symphonic musical piece with high parts, low parts, happy parts, sad parts, fast parts and slow parts. Lent is like the adagio.  As in a musical symphony, the liturgical calendar is the conductor leading us to the joy and sadness that combine to make the Beautiful.