15. Celebrate Life
‘The universe, it could be said, exists to celebrate itself and revel in its own beauty.’
Gary Kowalski
I remember hearing a comedian contrasting the Brazilian carnival with the British equivalent — Shrove Tuesday and pancakes! The comedian commented by saying that perhaps we get the carnival we deserve! Western culture certainly has an odd way of relating to celebration. A bit like voting, it seems like it is relegated to a few special occasions. There’s an orgy of materialism at Christmas, a couple of weeks of sunshine over summer, plus a few other breaks here and there. Holidays, feasts and parties are fitted around work and other responsibilities. The holidays and celebrations themselves are an ambiguous affair for some. Without the distractions of work, people find themselves confronted with relating to family who perhaps they only spend brief moments relating to the rest of the year. Even more difficult for some — we are confronted by ourselves, by the reality of who we are or might be.
Walking through the streets of any town or city on a Friday or Saturday night in the UK does however suggest that there is a lot of celebrating going on! The intention of revellers is perhaps simply to forget the problems of work and life generally and to find a few hours of fun. It is easy to be dismissive of this as somehow just excess of alcohol, but maybe we should not be so quick to judge.
There is a great need for celebration in all aspects of life — from daily meals through school and work, to spirituality. Why is school not more fun? Why is work usually just about getting things done with the least effort and cost? Why can we not spend more time finding ways to be creative in work and turning that creativity into celebration? Or, if that is too big a stretch, why not at least find more time for relaxing and socialising with our colleagues? Our culture does not relate well to its Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter. The heavy interpretations put upon these celebrations by evangelical Christianity makes them difficult symbols for a largely secular society to relate to. Is there any way forward from this? Perhaps we could bring back the very long association of festivals with the seasons? Reminders of our connection to the Earth and our reliance on Earth’s providence might be more helpful than reminders of sin.
The money we are supposed to use to buy happiness — and presumably the chance for more play — never seems to arrive. Even if we ever have enough money, somehow play and celebration just refuse to be bought. The winners of lottery tickets after a few months apparently return to the same level of happiness prior to their win. So it seems that if you don’t know how to party now, money’s not going to help you learn!
For all the liberation of the last century or so we are also still quite a prudish nation. There is a strange ambivalence between licence on the one hand and an embarrassment about the body and sex on the other. The British seem to be strangely fascinated and yet disapproving of other people’s nudity. We have high rates of teenage pregnancy. Somehow we just cannot get over our guilty fascination and so we just communicate our ambivalent hang-ups to the next generation. Why do we not celebrate our own bodies? Instead, we are presented with (or present ourselves with) images of what we ‘ought’ to look like and are left with the dilemma of what to do.
Society has turned play into a strangely serious enterprise. Sport has become big business. It is discussed as part of news programmes with at least equal seriousness as major world events. One imagines that if a reporter were to dare to say: ‘Its only a game’ they would not last long in their job! Even amateur involvement in sports is not often that playful. By contrast, if we watch young children at play, or think back to our own childhood then of course there is total absorption in the moment. Cares are forgotten and a child is completely unselfconscious in their imagination and enactment of games and stories. (Perhaps this is partly what is referred to when we talk of the ecstasy that adults have apparently lost.) If you are fortunate enough to have a young child of your own, then perhaps (hopefully) you have had the chance to lose yourself with them by engaging in their play. Or perhaps the children of friends afford this opportunity. There comes a point of course where this is lost — or at least set aside — for more ‘grown-up’ activities and concerns. Some adults though, never seem to be able to go back. They fear looking silly or being considered strange if they indulge in ‘childish’ behaviour. People’s reactions to opportunities for playful behaviour say a lot about them. If you haven’t played for a while, maybe it’s time to give it a try! Eloi Leclere tells us that for Saint Frances of Assisi, salvation meant ‘enchanted existence’, whilst Meister Eckhart speaks of ‘living without a why.’
Perhaps there is something else, a bit more subtle, that is going on. It seems sometimes that our culture is very mundane — not given to much flamboyance, exuberance or public displays of emotion. Occasionally however, there occur strange outpourings of celebration or grief that appear incongruous with the pervading culture. There seems to be an element of this in the binge drinking culture discussed above. Our need for celebration is being frustrated and is driving us to neurotic behaviour.
Matthew Fox addresses this in his work Original Blessing. He says:
‘Another sin of omission…is the sin of limiting, always guarding or policing, pleasure. This sin of omitting Eros or love of life from our lives expresses itself in a preference for Thanatos, love of death. Thanatos represents the preoccupation with death, with the putting off of death, or with clinging to death-filled objects. By sinning in this way we refuse to fall in love with life, to love what is loveable, to savour life’s non-elitist pleasure, to celebrate the blessings of life, to return thanks for such blessings by still more blessing…
‘The sin of consumerism is a child of the sin of emission of Eros. When religion fails to celebrate authentic Eros in our lives, we fall in love with ersatz pleasures which are subject/object pleasures which can be bought and sold but do not satisfy.’
The mention of Eros and Thanatos in this quote takes us back to the quote from Ken Wilber in a previous chapter. I’ve equated pleasure more with soul than spirit in this work, but of course there is spirit in celebration. Eros unbounded though takes us back to the economy of ascendancy and it is important not to muddle the fulfilment of ecstasy as primarily a search for sensuality. Charles Taylor comments on this in his Sources of the Self:
‘…sensuality was given a new value. Sensual fulfilment … seems to be one of the irreversible changes brought about by the radical Enlightenment. The promotion of ordinary life, already transposed by deists into an affirmation of the pursuit of happiness, now begins to turn into an exaltation of the sensual. Sensualism was what made the Enlightenment naturalism radical.’
In a similar vein, according to Foucault, freedom without limits is no freedom at all.
From this, we can contrast celebration as an ‘aim’ — which is really just pleasure-seeking — with a deeper sense of what it means to celebrate. This is something akin to the contrast made between beauty of a superficial kind as compared to beauty that speaks of a deep ‘rightness’ within people, creatures or things. Like beauty and morality, celebration can easily be made into a thing to which we then aspire; a commodity that we might acquire. How can we, by contrast, be the celebration of the world? It is clearly linked to Brian Swimme’s ‘being pleasure for others’ and in finding delight in all things.
We are in a process of becoming, but also we have already become (when looked at from the ‘view from eternity’ - to use Spinoza’s phrase). We are already all that we ever need to be! (Even Grace Jantzen, whose work was examined in some detail earlier, has an element of becoming — of process — in her work. Just be!) So, start by celebrating yourself! Imperfect, precarious, frail, vulnerable, confused, or all of the above. All of this is telling us that we do not need to aspire — either in the world of work, or relationships or religion or spirituality. We can just delight in our own being!
This way of looking at ourselves translates easily into caring about others. When we acknowledge and take delight in the true beauty of others (not just their superficial attractiveness) then this is compassion. It is a further reason for celebration.
So, celebration is essential for genuine compassion. Compassion is rescued from being dull moralising, or even from being mercy by combining celebration with justice. When our families and communities and the wider community of all of life run in harmony, then this is justice. Again, justice is an expression of beauty and a cause for celebration. Because all is one, we are not separate from others or from nature. Compassion for and celebration of ourselves cannot be separated from compassion and celebration of all.
Within the context of the human economy of course there are times when we will fail to do what we should do or to treat others as they deserve to be treated. There is a ‘parochial’ journey to be made if you like, in finding ways to accommodate ourselves to what the world can reasonably expect of us. There will always be ambiguity in this, as often the world needs to be more accommodating of difference. This is part of our frailty and vulnerability as humans. We are time-bound and rarely glimpse that view from eternity described in the preceding paragraphs. But we can at least learn to laugh at ourselves, even as we are caught up in this limited perspective!
We are only a moment away from hilarity! The difficulty with society and with ego is that they take themselves too seriously. Humour is a great way to take us from the economy of ascendancy back down into the economy of descendancy, where celebration rules.
