Only a few days now until Pentecost but here’s the question: what does a “feast” mean to you? Any feast – not just Pascha and Pentecost, Theophany and Transfiguration – but any feast, the patronal feast of your community, your name day – how do feasts “fit” into your experience of the faith?
I ask the question because it dawns on me watching Stefan Gates’ excellent series Feasts (UK readers can watch the last two episodes online), on BBC4 that the thinking, and experience of “feasts” is becoming increasingly alien in our contemporary Western society.
I remember the various feasts and festivals celebrated in Pittsburgh as a teenager. I think that perhaps, because at the time, the city was very ethnic, the celebration of these festivals was as much about ethnic pride and diversity as it was about the actual feast. This means that in many respects, the celebration of, and perception of these interruptions in our daily humdrum retained “more” of their original character. Today, occasionally when we are on the continent, we luck into the celebration fo a local feast – such as this St. Martin’s day festival in Brussells a few years ago.
What is interesting to me however, is that in over ten years living in the UK . . . I’ve never witnessed or participated in a single feast. Not one. My other half ( a native ) has never experienced a feast like I have many times over – and so watching Sefan Gates’ program for him, is sometimes quite awkward – as he has no point of reference for it. Our conversations about the role of feasts in the cycle of life, and more specifically in the liturgical cycle has thus, sparked my question.
How do feast days “work” or function in our lives as believers, now. Is that experience or perception radically different from 30 years ago, 100; and if so, how? Have we lost the fun & function of “feasting” in our post-Christian, post-modern, post-everything society? Or has it just been replaced with football and shopping?
While your thinking about your own response – here are two quotes about “feasts” from St. Proklos.
A virgin festival today, brethren, calls our tongue to praise, and the present feast, through benefits to those gathered, becomes a patron and indeed it is only natural. . . . Amicable and extraordinary is this gathering. Behold! Land and sea bring gifts to the Virgin on their backs, [the sea] in ships calmly under sail, [the land] escorting unhindered the way of those who come [by foot]. Let Nature leap! let the race of men rejoice! that women above all may be honoured; let humanity celebrate, that virgins above all may be glorified!
- Hom. 1.1Many and various celebrations cheer the life of man. Through the cycle of feasts the sorrow of life’s suffering changes into delight. Just as those arriving safe to land from the surge of the open sea rejoice at natural havens, as the embrace of life, so too after many circumstances man rejoices in the feast as a mother of ease. For a festival is a forgetting of grief, a sleep of cares, a cultivator of joy, a patron of joyousness, a season of prayer, summer-fruit for the poor, adornment of churches, festival of cities, wreck of enmity, rise of friendship, heaven on earth. And why do I say so much? A feast is resurrectional fruit, according to the prophet, who says: “Celebrate Judah, your feasts, for from the earth rises the one who breathes upon your face!”
- Hom. 3.1
4 Responses to “Feasts”
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It’s important to remember the old saying (or is it an American convert saying??) “No feast without a fast” and my own parallel, “No fast without a feast”. Essentially the traditional fasting calendar, as my first Orthodox priest pointed out, puts poverty on the wealthy. If a Byzantine Prince is forced by his piety to eat (at least on Wed and Fri and for Lent) what the poor eat all the time, a sense of equality and justice is inculcated. Then, when a feast rolls around – where the poor can’t often afford to do anything special, but do strain to buy something “upscale” and the rich suddenly host a public table… then something Messianic has happened, something Christ-like.
Sadly some have taken the fasts and become rather legalistic about them. Likewise the feasts have become restricted to sort of a legalistic “church box” where we keep them out of sight. We know that “fasting” in our world, adhering to what would now be called veganism, can be *terribly* pricey! It’s possible to require a huge income to eat that way. Yet most of the world do it all the time. And when the feasting rolls around most of us rush out to buy ready-made fancy stuff…
You know where I’m going here, you weave your own material…
oo oo Huw, how curious that you put it in the context of fasting – and then as well with social justice.
For about three years now we’ve been contemplating re-setting the context of feasts by introducing a bit of “retro-praxis”. Back in the late antique period (before the late fourth century, possibly in some areas, into the first half of the fifth) the custom of fasting a week before the feast coalesed into the Great Fast or Lent. Some feasts still have the fast before – but think about it for a moment – if one had to observe the fast customs for one week out of every month (for the major feast of each month) the consciousness, of which you speak could really take root, and develop. Wednesdays & Fridays come and go – there is not enough time, not enough continuity, and space for reflection in that short period of time to really give it an impact. Not to mention those days have dubious histories – they were, I believe, instituted because they were days on which Jews did not fast. Your thoughts give new impetus to this idea.
hmmm . . . .
I always assumed the Wed/Fri thing was more “training”. Those two are among the earliest fasts in the church, of course (attested to by the Didache), but as we picked up the “fullness” of the calendar it makes more sense: you have to stay in practice, yes? I think that’s one reason some of the Eastern folks now keep the Wed/Fri fast even during the Pascha season: we’re so bloated with a super-abundance of food, that a 50-day party might as well be “in the world”.
I’ve read in Talley’s “Origins of the Liturgical Year” about all these mini-fast periods. It makes much better sense than the extended 40 (or more) fasting period, but I think some part of the 40-day lent makes sense given my first hypothesis: in a time when food storage meant “burying it under the snow”, by the time Lent rolls around, it is the wealthy who have food left to share…
Today we may *need* a bunch of fasts just to keep us honest…
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