50 Days of Celebration Celebrations are the firework moments of life that bring with them a sense of what it means to have become another part of ourselves. Always, always, they deepen the very meaning of life for us as we go along. Most important of all, perhaps, there is as much a spiritual component to celebration as there may be a social one. Celebrations are what help us to realize, to recognize, who we really are and want to be. At our deepest moments in life, as part of our highest aspirations. The very idea of “celebration” has, in the Western world, been a gift of the church to us. In feudal times, the celebration of feast days—celebrations of the great moments of the faith and the great holy people who had once given light to our lives—punctuated all the great seasons of the year. They took us deeper and deeper into what it meant to talk about life as sacred and so to live a spiritually centered life. Today, many of those same feasts have been secularized to the point of invisibility. Christmas has become Santa Claus to many; Easter is a bunny; All Saints Day is an orgy of ghosts and demons. The old ethnic feasts that celebrated heritage as well as sanctity have disappeared. So who are we and where have we come from and what matters now? Without answers to these questions, our spirits go dry. The humdrum sets in. The ennui overtakes us. The future sinks to grey. The celebration of life—of what it is to be alive, to be in love, to be on the right path as we go—is an art. It is an antidote to depression. It renews a sense of depth and gives life a more enduring measure of meaning. It is celebration that really teaches us what it means to be alive rather than simply living through it. The celebration of Easter Sunday is followed by Paschal Time, 50 days of holy hilarity while the church points again and again to the empty tomb. Paschal Time is a season for celebrating the Christ who lives in us still. Celebrate! by Joan Chittister
Posted on: Mon, 05 May 2014 16:50:18 +0000
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