It’s hard to celebrate properly. Many people want to, but they just don't know how.
Mostly people celebrate badly because their idea of celebration is to overdo things. They try to celebrate by taking ordinary things (eating, drinking, having fun, playing) to excess. Celebration, for many, means over-eating, over-drinking, loud socializing, drunken singing, and staying at parties into the wee hours of morning, all in the hope that somehow in all that excess they will achieve celebration (whatever that means). But, for all our frenzied effort, there is precious little genuine enjoyment.
I grieve as I watch these so called celebrations – birthday parties, transitions into adulthood, end of academic year parties, wedding anniversaries and so on. It’s loud and hyped but the soul is silently in hiding; hardly attended to.
Occasionally people do succeed and genuinely celebrate. At those times we feel ourselves more deeply joined to others, widened, made larger, made more sensitive to the people around us, and sense more deeply the love and joy that lie at the heart of life. We then come close to a genuine celebration because all true celebration is the celebration of lives, of people who have added meaning to our lives. But that rarely happens and it never happens when we are in frenzy. Too often our celebrations are followed by a hangover. Why?
The reasons for this are complex, deep, and mostly hidden from us.
Perhaps the primary reason why we find it so difficult to genuinely celebrate is because we are not reflective enough. We haven’t gone back to the Source of all our blessings and sense that awe that if not for God none of these good things would have been our portion. We haven’t been grateful enough. We haven’t stepped back and recognized that the people in our lives have played a significant part in who we are today. God has used them to shape our lives. That’s why we celebrate with them. We haven’t taken the time to go beneath the surface to uncover the deeper reasons for our celebration. And these richer reasons will always be about the people in our lives and the God who rules over our lives. So celebration is seldom about us. A genuine celebration is always a God-centred appreciation of others in our lives.
But because our lives are so centred on our pleasures and our enjoyment, whenever we throw a party we tend to pursue unrestrained enjoyment too much and substitute excess for meaning. The champagne-soaked athletes celebrating a major victory and the mindless frenzy of a Mardi gras give us all the video footage we need to understand this. But excess isn't true enjoyment, nor is obliterated consciousness heightened awareness of self or of others or of God. They are weak, unsatisfying substitutes. They just leave us with a hangover.
The very purpose of celebration is to heighten and intensify the meaning of something (a birthday, a wedding, a major achievement, a victory, a graduation, the birth of a child, the beginning or ending of a year). These events demand to be shared with those we love, heightened, widened, and trumpeted. We have an inborn need to celebrate and this is very healthy.
What does it mean to celebrate something? To celebrate an occasion is to heighten it, share it, savour it, enlarge it, make it loud and clear. We also celebrate in order to link ourselves more fully to others, to intensify a feeling, to bring ourselves to experience deep unspoken meanings and values, and, more commonly, just to rest and unwind with those we truly love. But because of our incapacity to enjoy something for its meaning and value, we often try to create that enjoyment through excess and seek the ecstasy of heightened self-awareness in the obliteration of our consciousness.
Small wonder we often trudge home with a hangover, emptier, more tired, more alone. A hangover is an infallible sign that somewhere we missed a signpost.
Oh, how we need to redeem celebration! Christ came and declared a wedding, a feast, a celebration, at the heart of life. God has given us every permission to enjoy life and its pleasures. And when we truly celebrate life, we deepen life; we heighten life; we enjoy life and glorify the One who is the primary reason for all our celebrations.
