Foolish days

We are in the "foolish days" before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. During this carnival season we encounter many people dressed up in crazy costumes and people wearing masks. MASKS is a term with which we have rather negative associations right now. Hiding - petrified - lifeless - inauthentic - numb - breathless.

There is a book by Siegfried Lenz that tells us something different about masks.
In his book "The Mask" he tells about a student who spends his semester vacations with his grandfather, the island innkeeper. It has become summer. The first vacationers have arrived on the small island. A storm whips across the island and when the people dare to go to the beach again, there lies a large box, gone overboard from a ship in the storm. Inside are masks, destined for the Ethnological Museum in Hamburg. The people try on the masks and suddenly become dragons, tigers or pumas themselves. The supposed masking reveals the true face. Under the protection of the masks, enmities are settled, prejudices are forgotten and a love affair is forged. The masks give their wearers new identities and new possibilities.

"The villagers find that the mask gives them a certain freedom. A freedom of saying, of confiding, but also a freedom of anger, of rage, of indignation that can be released under the mask," says Lenz. Behind the masks, people also change. They do not hide behind them, but rather make themselves known and show their true nature. Maybe Lenz wanted to tell us: "Give a person a mask and he will tell you the truth and show his real self".

I experience the possibility of disguise at carnival in a similar way. By slipping into a costume, I leave my everyday role and take on a "new identity" for a limited time. With it, I can live behaviors that I can't always live in everyday life because of my positions and tasks. And this opens up a space of experience that is simply fun and in which something of the "lightness of being" can be experienced.
In this sense, I wish everyone, with or without disguise, a carnival season blessed by God.

Helau, hall die Gail, Ra Ra Ra, Rolle Katz!

Sr. Dorothea Köhler