Ash Wednesday Marks the Start of Lent Across Louisiana
Carnival season ends and the forty days of Lent begin with Ash Wednesday services in New Orleans and Lafayette, as the faithful and nonbelievers alike receive ashes and reflect on the season's meaning.
Ash Wednesday has arrived across Louisiana, bringing Carnival season to a close and ushering in the forty days of Lent. From Saint Louis Cathedral in New Orleans to Saint John the Evangelist Cathedral in Lafayette, worshippers gathered to receive the sign of the cross smeared on their foreheads with ashes from the previous year's burnt Palm Sunday palms.
The transition is stark. The day before, Mardi Gras filled the streets with revelry and excess. Now, Zamboni street sweepers wash the city streets clean, and the faithful—alongside the curious—file into churches to begin a period of fasting, prayer, and penance. Business suits stand cheek-by-jowl with crimson-caped gentlemen and ladies in smeared lipstick, all awaiting priests dressed in the Vestments of Sorrow.
In Lafayette, outside Rêve Coffee Roasters across from the Amtrak Rosa Parks Centre loading platform, Silvia spoke with a big red-hatted supporter of Donald Trump who had just arrived by train from Houston. The encounter underscored the diverse crowd that Ash Wednesday draws—people from all walks of life, united by the ritual of ashes.
Lent is often described as the oddest holiday in the Christian calendar. It emphasizes forty immovable days of everything the King Cake Baby Jesus grew up opposing, yet it remains the longest observance of the faith. The season is calculated according to the Gregorian Calendar, with Easter changing with the moon—a system that some, like L. A. Norma, find none too accurate. As she lamented to a bewildered tourist sharing a pedicab, the secular world has leap year and Sadie Hawkins Day, but the liturgical calendar has its own peculiar logic.
Easter Sunday marks Lent's end and also welcomes Spring. It is a holiday borrowed long ago by the marauding legions of Rome from religions that had been beating those same drums before Rabbi Jesus took His show on the road. Spring and Easter may be the oldest celebration calculated—or miscalculated—into Canon Law, with instruments created out of faith in suffering and suspicion of pleasure.
Suffering is not to be monkeyed with in these theological calculations. Carnival's pleasures, however, are reducible by God or His agents with their inaccurate stopwatches. Lenten fasting knits Carnival's raveled sleeve and prepares the faithful for Spring's rebirth. As the bean sprout and the jazz man say, «Blow the roof off the sucker.»
This year, Lent begins with sunny mornings and a warm place in the kitchen to read Internet posts and sip coffee. Outside, the live oaks are a soft young green. Live oaks do not dump their leaves until Spring's new buds arrive—a fact that followers of JFK conspiracy theories will eagerly share. Then they change from old dark green to young soft green almost overnight. Today, soft-green rules coastal Louisiana, and the old alligators lie on the banks in whatever sun they can find, dreaming of Easter baskets and Spring.
The day after Mardi Gras is a time of transition, a threshold between celebration and reflection. It is a day when the faithful and nonbeliever alike know it is Lent, and to ashes we shall return. The ceremony is universal, transcending doubt and belief. Inside churches, brothels, and bars, people tremble with fears and doubts, yet they suffer no doubt about this ritual. It is a shared moment of humility and mortality, a reminder that even in a world of pleasure and excess, there is a season for everything.
As Lent begins, Louisiana embraces the ashen trail that leads off the streets and into forty days of Vatican-sanctioned smudge. It is a time to reflect, to fast, and to prepare for the rebirth that Easter promises. The live oaks and the alligators, the churchgoers and the revelers, all participate in this ancient rhythm. The day after Mardi Gras is not an end but a beginning—a journey through suffering toward renewal.
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