eschatological banquet

I was looking at these photos from the Oakhurst bar-b-que festival last August, taken when I'd been back in Decatur for a day, and, since Joe, my friend and colleague, was there I was looking to see if I'd gottten him in anyone of these. I would have to say that that would be shadowy. He may be there in the top photo on the right, or even further back in the shadows. What I'm considering is a further reflection on Bakhtin's study of Rabelaisian carnival: the importance of eating and defecating - all accompanied by laughter in the broad vein. Joe was vilified for sending a scatological e-mail on our last day on campus. He had to apologize and listen to a moral lecture on how adults behave and what decorum needs to be maintained. As I've read Bakhtin I've seen Joe's act in a much richer light. If there was any fault - in terms of carnivalesque - it was that he used e-mail instead of bringing it into a more feasting atmosphere. I think he was more right than wrong - especially since there'd been an experiment on campus with carnival: an experiment that did not venture enough into what popular and folk forms might already exist on campus, and instead ventured more into sketch comedy. What was being turned over? What leveling of hierarchies occurred? In terms of this attempt at carnival, Joe's claim that he'd taken a shit in every room on campus, was more spot on. In terms of carnival being a vivification of the regenerative properties of the heavenly banquet: You can't spell eschatology without scatology. I think that that might make a good Latin motto - except you'd have to look for a different word play: something like "non feceae non fecundium."
If I were working on a carnival, I would put such a feast right in the middle of things. For our little reform school there is a certain irony: Calvin hated Rabelais [ they were contimporaries], and to Rabelais, Calvin would be the very dry and humorless authority figure he targeted with Gargantua and Pantagruel. And perhaps our attempt at carnival symbolized the tension we feel in the PCUSA now a days: that something old is dying and something new is being born. That is the central purpose of carnival: to provide room and liberty for the disestablishment of the old order to disintegrate and out of its ashes the new order to be born, through the vehicles of laughter, feasting and enjoyment of the grotesque (and understand the grotesque not only as physical shapes but as to natural quantities and types of speech).
Right now I'm considering how to invest my upcoming ordination service with elements of carnival.