Celebration? Now?
To be honest, I didn’t want to host a picnic last evening.
It was our turn to have the church over for a Wednesday summer supper, and I had looked forward to doing another spread of cheeses and fruit and beauty.
The grazing board collective spread from last summer.
Instead, the week had felt awkward and disorienting and deeply sad in many ways.
Our dear friends who would have been at this picnic were experiencing a tragedy and two families, also friends, were with them in their grief and couldn’t attend either.
My heart felt sick celebrating as a church when some of our own were mourning.
Our friend and former pastor lost his mother to the same cancer that had taken his wife’s mom years ago last weekend.
A friend from Costa Rica, a widow after her husband’s sudden death two years ago, lost her father to age and dementia this week, just as she finished radiation for a tumor behind her eye.
My sister-in-law returned from a trip taking the children of one of her good friends to their mother receiving experimental treatment for an inoperable brain tumor in another state.
My husband’s grandfather is receiving hospice care and struggles with heart failure and rapid decline.
The newsfeeds and radio waves are full each day with new disasters, doomsday warnings, indiscretions, and injustices.
Why in the world would we celebrate? How do we swallow grapes and olives when it feels like the grave wants to swallow us whole?
Then I remembered lemon layer cake.
To be honest, I can’t be sure which tragedy it was that prompted it. From timeline dates, I’m guessing it was more shootings between police and peaceful protestors in Dallas, and I didn’t know what to do with all the grief spilling over in our country.
The friend and pastor I mentioned above had just preached a sermon on celebration as a spiritual discipline, as a way of pushing back the darkness and saying the story of this bleeding world is not the story that wins in the end. He challenged us to throw parties not because everything was alright but precisely because it wasn’t, echoing God’s people remembering their appointed feasts outlined in Leviticus no matter what else was going on.
And so, shoulders hunched and feelings a mess, I baked a lemon layer cake with lemon curd and ate it with my children, put on music and danced.
Celebration is an act of defiance, I am convinced.
In her incredible article, “Joy Is An Act of Resistance: How Celebration Sustains Activism,” Ingrid Fetell Lee recounts a story about Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel:
“Wiesel described a memory of a fellow prisoner trading a ration of bread for materials with which to piece together a makeshift menorah during Hanukkah. Shocked that the man would trade something so essential to his survival, Wiesel asked him, ‘Hanukkah in Auschwitz?’ And the man replied, ‘Especially in Auschwitz.’ …The pursuit of joy amid great struggle is a way to tend our humanity when it is most threatened.”
In a similar article in Relevant Magazine, Dorothy Greco says, “Despite His continued faithfulness, our memories tend to be short-term. We so easily get distracted and swallowed up by both the incidental and enormous challenges of life that we forget the many times God has dropped manna or parted the waters for us. When the bank account dips below minimum, the mechanic’s bill exceeds our weekly paycheck, or the pathology report comes back positive, it feels more natural to shake our clenched fists at God than to organize a party.
Which is why celebrations are so crucial to our spiritual life. The very act of celebrating anchors us in a deeper story—one that precedes any current hardship or pain.”
Nicole Zasowski in What If It’s Wonderful?: Release Your Fears, Choose Joy, and Find the Courage to Celebrate, believes that “every moment—especially on the Tuesdays—offers an opportunity to celebrate that God is who He says He is and He can do what He says He can do, even before the story is finished. Celebrating the end is our hope and joy for the middle.”
In the midst of pandemics, birthdays still need celebrating, in the midst of chasms of grief, celebrating anything or anyone seems insensitive, excessive or naive. But maybe it’s brave as well.
Jack Gilbert put it this way: “We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”
Maybe it’s brave and maybe it’s necessary:
I read those words from poet Lori Hetteen on a day when I was wracked with the worst anxiety of my life and a friend brought ice cream sundaes to our family as a symbol of hope and resilience. I will never forget that “cake.” It was part of our survival.
And so, last night, we feasted. Folks trailed in with bounty from their gardens and baskets of crackers and neighborhood kids ran in and out of the food tent. New babies bounced on knees and whispered stories of loneliness found ears to hear, and soccer balls from pick up in the parking lot bounced over the wall where there was laughter.
On the one hand, I was holding in my mind my dear friends trying to make sense of disaster. On the other hand, it was precisely because of that disaster that it was imperative we still gather.
We “are beset by many dangers, and traitors multiply in the dark. It will not be so in the Mended Wood.”― S.D. Smith, Ember Falls
It will not always be so. Suffering will not get the final say.
Patrick and I read Ember Falls and its companions, and the scene I’ll never forget is when the warrior rabbits find an inexplicable joyful hidden tavern amidst a terrible war, where folks are making music and art and eating delicious food.
The hero is bewildered at the sight, so the leaders of it explain, “Wilfred knew that there’s no way to truly retake what was lost if we don’t start at First Warren,” Helmer said, glancing at the banner on the wall. Remember. Resist. Retake…We take them from their lives of bleak indignities, and we bring them to an inn of life and light. We bring them here to remind them of what we had, and what we might have again…we have to keep loving what’s on the other side of this fight—the other side of this rescue— and that will have to make us brave.” -Ember Rising by S.D. Smith
This week, may you find the courage to celebrate, even in some small way. Sing a song of praise to the sun that still shines. Bake the cake and share it with a neighbor as a way of spitting in the face of hatred and injustice. Dance and gather as reminder of what’s on the other side of this fight.
Don’t Hesitate
by Mary Oliver
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
