From Carnival to Mardi Gras

The human species is distinctive in at least three ways, said poet W. H. Auden. It features the only animals who work, laugh, and pray. A zoologist might take exception—don’t honeybees work, dolphins grin, and mantises pray?—but Auden’s list provides a neat framework for self-reflection. What about evangelical Christians, I found myself wondering. How do we measure up?

At work, we excel. In Latin America, Eastern Europe, and even Communist China, opponents must grudgingly acknowledge that for all their faults Christians are industrious. Our forefathers invented the Protestant work ethic, after all.

We value the work ethic so highly that we let it gobble everything in sight. Our churches run like corporations, our quiet times fit into a datebook (ideally, on computer software), and our pastors maintain the hectic pace of Japanese executives. Work becomes the only acceptable addiction.

The art of prayer is one we should have mastered by now, but I have my doubts. We are constantly tempted to turn prayer into another form of work, which may explain why prayers in evangelical churches major on intercession. We bring God our wish lists and rarely get around to listening.

I have noticed lately that biblical prayers (as seen, for instance, in the Psalms) seem closer in form to the conversation you might hear in a barber shop than to a shopping list. I am learning about such prayer from the Catholics, who have a better grasp on prayer as worship. Oddly, for those who saturate their lives with prayer—Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Teresa of Ávila—prayer seems less like a chore and more like a never-ending conversation, like ordinary life with the simple addition of an Audience.

In laughter, the third leg of Auden’s triad, Christians trail behind the rest of the world. How else to explain the low circulation of The Wittenberg Door and the angry letters in CHRISTIANITY TODAY from subscribers who fail to comprehend satire?

Off to the Carnival

To correct the imbalance, Auden proposed resurrecting the medieval practice of Carnival, the raucous holiday preceding Lent. He writes, “Carnival celebrates the unity of our human race as mortal creatures, who come into this world and depart from it without our consent, who must eat, drink, defecate, belch, and break wind in order to live, and procreate if our species is to survive. Our feelings about this are ambiguous.… We oscillate between wishing we were unreflective animals and wishing we were disembodied spirits, for in either case we should not be problematic to ourselves. The Carnival solution of this ambiguity is to laugh, for laughter is simultaneously a protest and an acceptance.”

In the Middle Ages, Carnival offered an outlet for expressing such ambiguity. Young men dressed up as girls, young girls as boys. Individuals hid behind masks and costumes that tended to caricature the oddity of humanity through exaggeration and parody: false noses, elaborate hairdos, skulls, fat bellies, fanged teeth.

I got caught in Mardi Gras once, smack in the middle of Bourbon Street, New Orleans, and it bore little resemblance to the medieval Carnival. Young women walked through the streets yelling, “Breasts for beads!” In exchange for a gaudy plastic necklace, they would pull up their T-shirts and bare themselves. In their drunkenness, lust, and even violence, these revelers were not parodying but rather groveling in animality.

The descent from the church’s Carnival to the debauchery of Mardi Gras is a theological descent. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “If it is not true that a divine being fell, then one can only say that one of the animals went completely off its head.” That, precisely, is where Christians part company with modern materialists. Carnival parodies a being who fell; Mardi Gras celebrates an animal gone off its head.

The only good reason to find humor in such phenomena as sex, oversized noses, death, and the belching reflex is that we still retain the faintest echo of Eden. In some deep and ambiguous manner of instinct, it seems odd to us that we upright vertebrates, tipped with a divine flame, act so much like other vertebrates.

I have read some of the classic materialists—Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Bertrand Russell—and I have yet to find the slightest curve of a smile lurking among their words. The “politically correct” movement shows a similar solemnity. One can parody only what one respects.

The Christian has a great advantage over other people, C. S. Lewis used to say: not by being less fallen than they nor less doomed to live in a fallen world, but by knowing that he or she is a fallen person in a fallen world. For this reason, I think, we dare not forget how to laugh at ourselves.

In a way, laughter has much in common with prayer. In both acts, we stand on equal ground, freely acknowledging ourselves as fallen creatures. We take ourselves less seriously. Work divides and ranks; laughter and prayer unite.

Auden ends his reflection with this warning: “A satisfactory human life, individually or collectively, is possible only if proper respect is paid to all three worlds. Without Prayer and Work, the Carnival laughter turns ugly, … the mock aggression into real hatred and cruelty. Without Laughter and Work, Prayer turns Gnostic, cranky, Pharisaic, while those who try to live by Work alone, without Laughter or Prayer, turn into insane lovers of power, tyrants who would enslave Nature to their immediate desire—an attempt which can only end in utter catastrophe, shipwreck on the Isle of the Sirens.”

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