Feasts are a break in the rolling of time; they are an exodus to what is absolute, to what is hoped for, to joy and to communion with the community and to what you become when you embrace God. New clothes and good food are only an outer image of the spiritual beauties that descend upon us in feasting.
All peoples do make a break in the monotony of time with their feasts; but Christianity has given feasts a breadth and a vastness which is unheard of. First, Christianity infuses eternal life in each day of the year since there is not one day in which is void of feasting for Christ’s life events or that of a Saint or that of a group of Saints. The life of each saint is told in a book called “The Sinxar” to which you can refer for knowing a Saint’s life and be sanctified through it. From that perspective, there is a daily exodus from the temporality of our days; and this exodus takes us to the splendor of piety and the different aspects of virtue practiced by the celebrated Saint, as they come in the worship service of that day. You do not reckon a day by what comes before it or after it; but you draw yourself to Holiness that is not defined by time.
Therefore, the feast gives you a freedom from your days and routine and so you are able to live the feast. And if you rid yourself of the weight of your day, you live the remembrance you are holding for that feast day. That is a way of life for you in time. You make the past present in you and in the community. This is what we have meant with ‘bringing the past into the present that you live now’ as if there is no time separation between them. And that is not a matter of mere reminiscing or imagining; you live the past in the present and so there remains no past in your conscience. You experience the reality – of the past – now.
That cannot take place unless there is a spiritual stir in you. This is why the feast is an event that the community experiences in its ‘now’ (present). In general, that is in need of a Liturgy or a celebration that is similar to it (the event). And you long for the return of the season of feasting for yearning to experience that splendor every year. And at the base of this is that the re-tasting of the splendor is the uniting factor (between past, present and future) which transcends time since it refuses to consider eternity as only for the end times.
Joy gives rise to joy; so in the same way the feast is a remembrance, it is also an in-advance-tasting of what is to come. That is in the same way the feast is a now-experience of the past, it also is also an in-advance tasting of what is to come, since what is to come is always the Kingdom. And so, God’s face appears to us. As such the feasts are the presence of God in the present which is renewed in you and in the community.
You live the festive season with the community which in its ties of unity receives the eternal meaning (from the past) and expands to things of the age to come making these things heavenly.
The splendor of the feast obtains only if you participate in it with repentance; as such the festiveness of the season takes place in the heart since the heart is the meeting place with God. And all festivities and seasons are nothing if God is not at its core.
With the above there is generally a difference between the religious feasts and the national or civil holidays since the latter are merely a reminiscing of what is old and past the core of which is nostalgia. While the remembrance that is based on faith and that “lives” by faith has its reality in the experience of and tasting of the Divine in us. As such we celebrate the feast by Grace. In other words, it is the Lord who is in us feasting for Himself.
What is it that threatens the feasts? It is the absence of God from the hearts of people; that distorts the feasts and changes its nature. For instance, when Christmas, or the feast of the Nativity, becomes the feast of “children” or the feast of “the family”, then no relation between the feast and the “child of Bethlehem” remains. In that sense we have a feast other than Christmas. I have no objection to “the feast of children” or that of the “family” or to the parties that come with the good food of the feasts; I am only saying that that has no relation to Christmas. What we have in the Bible is: “Be vigilant and pray” (Matth. 26: 14).
Christianity knows nothing of the parties that accompany feasts. There are foods that go with the feast. The Church did not say no to that since regular social life carries within it the joy of the feast; but it is important that food should not be the focus. Things that have beauty are surrounded with danger. This is why we need to be adamant in having our feasts focused on the Divine, that is our feasts to be a celebration of and a rejoicing in God and His Saints so that the sense of entertainment does not take over the feast and spoil it and thus, through it, spoil us also.
I come from a simple and humble family which holds the great and the small feasts alike so that it does not miss a chance for sanctification. And sanctification in that family is hidden in the icons and in proper hymning which was carried over with my mother from her father and she carried it over in the Church.
That is why my parents used to say the Lord’s Prayer in Russsian which some of the lowly members of our Church learned it; while the children of the high class families, as we call them, used to study in the French schools of the Monks. And we, the lowly, were rooted in the Eastern aspect of the family though we studied deeply, in fluent and eloquent French, what we were able to express concerning the heritage of Antioch, the capital city of our ancient country and the heart of Christianity before the Arab conquest of our lands.
I was born into that type of home which cherished old customs. And once towards the end of July and beginning of August, while my mother was still in bed recovering after she delivered me, her father entered the house and found it full of packed things to be taken up with us to the mountain resort for the summer. And he asked my mother: “What is this”? And she answered: “I have decided to baptize the child after our return to the city in October”. Then he said: “This is worldly talk. What if something wrong happens to the boy’s health? ‘How can we sing to the Lord in a foreign land?’” (Plsams 136) (That is in a place where you can find no one to baptize him). My mother had to obey him and call the priest who came with all what was needed for the baptism; and he baptized me in the Orthodox faith.
All my life, I have tried to comprehend my “coming” from such a faith and the feasts related to it.
Translated by Riad Moufarrij
Original Text: “الأعياد” – An Nahar – 14.01.2012
