Festivity is NOT frivolity...

Tonight our Play-Full Living book group resumed - after a week off for a conference in Nashville - and it was like a family reunion in all the best ways:  lots of tenderness, lots of laughter and a whole lot of interest in being together.  We shared stories of being awakened by the awe and beauty of nature, of how taking a risk to listen to another more often than not pays off in unexpected blessings and how the gap between our professed life goals and the way we actually spend our days is a lesson in humility and grace.

One of the important topics we explored is whether we journey through our day mostly as a "tourist or a traveller?" 

+ Tourists are consumers who want their experiences delivered to them in a controlled environment; travellers are open to the journey and invite the unexpected.

+ Tourists want life to be clean and efficient; travellers look for the out of the ways places where real people eat, drink and live.

+ Tourists want others to serve them while travellers look forward to meeting new friends as equals as the road unfolds.

It made me think of one of my foundational theological references, Feast of Fools, by Harvey Cox.  Back in 1969 he noted that in a spirituality of festivity - a way of embracing the sacred and the secular simultaneously in celebration, juxtaposition and a sense of God's abundance - he points out that this spiritual path is neither superficial nor frivolous.

+ One key to living festively is to admit the presence of evil in the world.  "The reason why Latin American Catholicism is so festive is not because it ignores or represses the evil side of live, but precisely because it recognizes and even affirms it."  There IS brutality and pain, there is clearly fear and chaos and failure - there is SIN - and too often those of us in middle class Protestant congregations never acknowledge the shadow.  We are terrified of talking about sin and passion, too.  And so we tend to wither and become irrelevant rather than advocates of joy in a festive way.

+ Another key is that festivity is not frivolity.  The frivolous seeks to shock and in incapable of originality.  "It is the painted smile on a terminally sick patient."  The frivolous takes being playfull too seriously until nothing truly matters.  It is a form of cynicism that defeats hope which is trust born of God's love.

Cox writes:  Festivity - playfullness - with its essential ingredients... is itself an essential ingredient in human life. Its loss servers our roots in the past and clips back our reach toward the future. It dulls our psychic and spiritual sensibilities. For this reason it should not surprise us that the spiritual phenomenon we (now) call the "death of God" should have happened (late 1960s) in Western industrial society, that place on the globe where festivity has reached its lowest ebb.  Nor is it a coincidence that Nietzsche, the same philosopher who deplored the disappearance of festivity in Christianity, also gave the phrase "God is dead" its first wide hearing. The link between the decline of festivity and the death of God can be fully substantiated.

Thank God for my laughing, festive and humble friends at tonight's study - and in our band and choir - and in the Church Council and throughout the congregation.  Dig these guys!