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. 1.1

Many 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