The feasts have gone by and we are back to daily routine. And in the understanding of peoples and religions, feasts break monotony and the aim is to get you out of the routine of time to place you in the eternity of the feast whereby the remembrance (of the feast) is not merely the imagination of something in the past but a summoning of the past to “nail” it to the present in such a way to bridge the gap between the present and the past. As if you get bored with what seems to you futile or morbid in our temporal time and you get to the “rendezvous” (the memory of the feast) and that brings with it the promise of blessings and the revelation of the Divine Beauty; as if the “rendezvous” breaks through the present time and transports you to the mystery of the Eternal and the choice of the Holy.
And so, the feast saves you from boredom and ennui, from the “hell” of morbidity to lift you up to what is above, to the dynamism of beauty in the “people of Abraham” -the Church – who has placed Herself in the beauty that comes down upon her, the Beauty of the Lord. The people of the Divine Book associate themselves with the remembrance of events that started with Abraham “the Father of Monotheism” and formed a holy history framed in the general history of Man; but it is a history that God has wrought in Man’s time; it is not of Man.
The believers see themselves involved with events that God has wrought and meant them to be salvation to people; that is a type of events cast into the Holiness of Eternity. And they are events brought about by God through prophets, as they are called in monotheistic religions, or through Saints who are chosen by God for their holy path in life; God teaches us through them or He writes His acts in them so that we can read Him and not them.
And the believers feel that the life events of Jesus or those of the Prophets or the Saints, are of the spiritual richness that convey to us salvation or reminds us of it as if we could forget about it if we do not remember it. What happens boosts our spiritual life, and we in turn endeavor to keep that “boost” as a stir in us not only on the feast day but in such a way that all the days of the year would be filled by the remembrance of the feast; that is away from languor and fatigue and drawn upwards to the power of God revealed in His saints. We like to pick what we register and keep; do not we accept things slipping with the time which is ever-present and changing as Heraclitus said? How would we soar spiritually if we accept to throw into oblivion the great spiritual happenings that the Savior has accomplished, or those done by His ancestors according to the flesh since Abraham, or those done by the apostles and all those who came from His holiness after He arose from the dead?
What is of interest to the believer is whether his life gathers what is of this time to itself; or Eternity, which is in his present life, gathers what is of Eternity to it. Of course, after the Resurrection, all what is Divine in the life of the Lord is cast on every Divine sigh in the soul of the righteous since it is the Holy Spirit, which He sent from on the Cross and after the Resurrection, Who is the One who establishes the saints.
We imitate each other in the Church, so we become similar to each other because we have received the same Grace and so we make the one core of the holy with various aspects; and we get close to the tradition of the Saints though we have a different expression of saintliness and asceticism knowing that behind the many outer expressions there is one Sainthood.
Thus the feasts of Martyrs has a different significance from that of whom we call the Righteous, that is the ascetic; and the saintliness of the Monk is different in its expression from that of the married person though the meaning of purity is the same in one and the other. And since we seek holiness with all categories of the righteous, we get enriched with its several expressions so that God would illuminate with it every soul.
That spiritual richness seems different, in its external form and not in its content, among the saintly monks and the saintly married people, among the saintly kings and the saintly poor. This variety in spiritual richness and its forms urges us to “feed on” the saintliness of the various groups and all the salvific happenings of the life of the Lord. That is why we choose all what has come in the Gospel and the life of the righteous to make them sundry fountains of Holiness for ourselves. This is why we have multiform paths of holiness from which particular individuals among us can take one path or another as an example for them and as such our spiritual richness is increased and completed.
Due to the variety of aspects and richness of the saintliness we find in those who are righteous, we need all that variety among them so we can do like them and soar through them. And as such the Church finds more richness with every “saint” She discovers, richness in the “newness” of the manifestation of his saintliness. For that we must not neglect the study of a new “saint” to beatify him so that we do not become poor in our knowledge of saintliness. In the life of each Saint, there are particular sayings and details of his way of life which builds us up and lifts us; and we need to know and talk about them so that our spiritual treasure increases. This is why we need to learn about the life of righteous people here and there so we do not become spiritually poor. And we need to spread this knowledge over the days of the year. And so we have a feast, or a few, every day so that the Saints get “uncovered” for us when we remember them and thus each day of the year becomes richer in its spiritual meaning and content.
The feast is an eternity which we see in our present; we see with every “rendezvous” (that is the feasts) we have with time since we long for a rich now-present Eternity. That is why we appoint Feasts and we celebrate with Joy. In life we encounter many sorrows. That is why we long for a “piece of Heaven on earth” which we call the feast. Those who are patient and longsuffering seek it all the time. That is why I always wondered at the stories of those who used to have weddings and celebrations during the First World War. I used to think that it would be difficult for a person to marry during hard times.
During crises, the believer longs for grace that grants him understanding and good conduct; as such his conduct would sometimes be a “feast”. How do we bring down Eternity into the time we live in? How do we render the earth a Heaven and render all the believers a Heavenly sheepfold in spite of our sinfulness? How can all of life become a feast – a realm, on this earth, for God?
Translated by Riad Moufarrij
Original Text: “محبو الأعياد” – An Nahar – 02-02-2013
