Feasting

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Olivier Clement:

In modern Western society, the virtues of seriousness, saving up, work, and reliance on willpower have put out the fires of feasting...We are defined by our reason and power, we have allowed our faculty for celebration to wither away. And there is undoubtedly a hidden link between the decline of the feast and the absence of God in a daily life that has become 'one-dimensional.'

Today we are seeing a revival of the feast. The pioneers of the revolution of May 1968 wished life to be like a feast, and their psychodramas in the Latin Quarter, the very home of a culture closed to anything that transcends the human, were evidence of a kind of liturgical longing...And new mystics are also appearing, whose mysticism is not merely indivual and secret, but danced, shouted, lived together.

But the new revolutionaries wish to transfigure life while spurning the spiritual sources without which there can be no genuine transfiguration. And the new mystics too often celebrate for the sake of celebrating and risk dissolving themeselves in an impersonalism unthinkingly imported from Asia. Both end by making ecstasy the end in itself...

In fact, if Christ is not risen, death will always have the last word, the days following the feast will be days of ashes and loneliness.

But if Christ is risen, Easter is the 'feast of feasts,' and we are henceforth capable of 'giving thanks in all things,' so that in the course of our daily struggle, even in martyrdom, we can be in a state of celebration.

The feast of the Church is closely allied to contemplation. The feast gives to each of us a first experience of the living God. It opens the 'eye of the heart' to his presence and makes us able to see for a moment the icon of the face, the fire at the heart of all things. In the feast any being and any thing is revealed as a miracle, so that, around the sanctified person, the world itself enters into feasting and in the miracle recovers its original transparency...

...[T]he feast in the world and the feast in the Church are rather alike, but there is a difference in order. In the world there is first exaltation, then bitterness; first the intensity of life, then sadness at the taste of death. In the Church there is first bitterness, then death to self, repentance that breaks down our insensitivity; then immense joy and peace, from having been forgiven, loved, and recreated, the joy of thus being all together, so many wondering children.

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