Fast first, then feast In England, at least one Catholic is ready to party this Christmas
Maitland, Sara
Sara Maitland FAST FIRST, THEN FEAST How God keeps Christmas We have lost the art of feasting. This is a little sad at Christmas time. We cannot feast, because we do not fast. am not, here,...
...It is so easy to keep clean...
...The wise men brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh: much is made of the theological and spiritual symbolism of these gifts, little of the crude fact that they are very expensive...
...Lent fills in the long season of the year when food in northern agricultural communities was most scarce and least attractive...
...I change my underwear daily...
...This is new...
...I have some friends who keep to the tradition of placing a tapped beer barrel in their front garden over Christmas-tide, free for all...
...Feasting is about brightness, a light in the dark...
...We spend millions of dollars a year not celebrating the fact that we are warm enough, but disguising it...
...Perhaps it was because they were available...
...Feasting is about excess after hunger...
...I am appalled by my pusillanimous responses: by the minginess of my imagination...
...Your potato heap and your grain store are running low...
...anyone who wants to is entirely free to fast, and many do...
...This is the feast day of a God who rips the invisible membrane between time and eternity so heaven floods the world, in an extravagant and abundant tide of love, and the world laps back, carried undiluted to the everlasting banquet...
...it meant feeling safe enough to hang up your sword knowing you were going to be among friends...
...that, simply in and of itself, was something to celebrate...
...Before electricity, it was dark most of the time, especially in the north...
...We have come to think it is rather vulgar to eat until we are bloated...
...I am talking about a larger social rhythm...
...am not, here, bemoaning the passing of the old "disciplines" of meatless Fridays, the from-midnight abstention before Communion, or the rigors of Lent...
...Of course they should wake up early, of course they should be overexcited, of course they should run amok and tear open their presents with greedy zeal...
...Such a notion would have been incomprehensible, for example, to the Vikings...
...Such comforts are not luxuries, they are the common experience of contemporary Western humanity...
...The feast of a God who comes into the cold, the dark, the silence of our prosperity and says, "Let's party...
...Candles were expensive-a candle-lit dinner was not about romantic intimacy, but rare moments of comfort and companionship...
...paint them bright colors, hand them lavishly to your children-look, we have eggs to eat...
...I wear jeans not my wedding garment, and I want the children to "calm down" and not wake up too early in the morning...
...Until this century it was not just the very poor who might well dread a long winter, it was everyone...
...And because we cannot do it ourselves, we tend to despise feasting itself...
...Feasting is about the joy of seeing old friends, and the excitement of meeting new people...
...God does not seem to mind materialism in a good cause...
...But feasting is about warmth-about huge fires and hearty dancing...
...For the church to say, "Now, now is the time we will fast...
...It is also necessarily hard work-many of us buy plastic Christmas trees because we are too idle to vacuum up a few fallen pine needles...
...Feast on eggs after fasting from them...
...no one had a deep freeze, a shop open late into the night, access to music and news at the press of a button...
...Last year the local clergy came and asked them to stop because people swilling beer upset those leaving midnight Mass...
...No one had instant light, warmth, travel, food...
...Warmth has become so normal that we find sweat distasteful...
...But it does mean that I never fast and so I don't know how to feast: and at Christmas time I sense something missing...
...Feasting is public, celebratory, and inclusive...
...to give gifts so extravagant that they put us into debt...
...Feasting is about putting on your finery, which takes so much time and effort that you cannot do it often...
...Perhaps this is what is meant by "blessed are the poor"- they know how to feast...
...Their idea of heaven, even after they had become Christian, was of a very noisy and garish place...
...getting clean is more of a routine than a celebration...
...Because out there, waiting at the hall door, were miles and miles and miles of dark, dangerous, and sinisterly quiet forest, miles and miles of salt sea where a ship could founder in the silent night and the foam spray would carry no message home...
...My house is warm even when I'm not in it...
...And the rich, whose cupboards are full, will not be allowed to taunt the poor with their pink cheeks and round bellies," is not about body-hatred, it's about making the best we can of what we've got...
...Cleanliness is not a delight for us either...
...No one has taken these away from us anyway...
...I wash my hair about four times a week...
...Feasting is about excess, extravagance, abundance...
...My children have never worn woolen underwear...
...Life is no longer rhythmical, a coming and a going, as it was...
...True feasting is about noisy sociability...
...Come, let us keep the feast...
...God chose to celebrate this feast "just at the worst time of the year," to be a light in the darkness, to comfort us on our lonely road, to prove over and over again that the things of the world are good, that fun is an ethical concept...
...In the autumn you killed any animals that you did not plan to breed next year-by the second half of the winter, you have either eaten them up or what remains is rancid, weevily, and smoked dry...
...I only recently learned that hens-free-range ones-radically reduce or even cease laying when the weather gets cold...
...to get roaring drunk, wear silly hats, and sing loud songs whose words we cannot quite remember...
...Any dark evening or dull morning that I come into my house, there at my finger tip is a bright light, clearer than the sun...
...I have never read any comment on the delicate courtesy of the church which imposed fasting as a gift upon her children at exactly the time of year when they would have been hungry anyway...
...I'm not sure that I can wear a paper hat and stop counting the cents, but that is my loss...
...But God, apparently, loves feasting...
...I tend to criticize the menu ("virgin birth- so out of date") and carp at the behavior of less refined guests ("oh, not 'Hark-the Herald' again...
...On the whole, all this is a good thing-I have no sentimental hankerings...
...It is about good manners...
...I can talk to my friends, however distant, whenever I want to...
...Now I buy a dimmer switch to reduce the glare...
...Nothing secretive or peaceful about it...
...When I was a child everyone who could afford to differentiated between winter and summer underwear: We wore woolly pants and vest from November to April...
...Dressing-up holds little charm...
...This is the feast day of a God who so delights in matter, in the stuff of the universe, in bodies, that he plunges into it all head first, and becomes a child...
...and you must keep something back for seed...
...the rats have been making free with what there is...
...Peace did not mean quietness, it meant huge drunken hugs instead of huge drunken fights...
...Instead of feasting we go in for "spirituality...
...I want protection from a sense of invasion more often than I think how exciting it would be to see someone new...
...We of the developed nations live in a society in which silence, or quietness, has become the central symbol of joy, of peace itself...
...most of my peers dress down when we relax and socialize...
...There is rarely a day when I do not encounter a stranger...
...Instead of extravagance, we talk about being "less materialistic"-at Christmas for heaven's sake...
...I wish I were able to feast with this extravagant host...
...We yearn for quiet because what we experience is a continuity of din...
...this lean period is given to us for grace...
...We are bombarded not just with heat and light and food, but with people...
...At least I can try...
...I have read many elaborate allegorical explanations of why eggs became especially associated with Easter...
...A brash new star, exotic foreigners, ecstatic shepherds, choirs of angels-not just a quiet messenger, but hosts of them, pouring through the night sky singing "Glory...
...And just as we are saturated with light, so are we with warmth...
...Now our cities are so full of light that it dims the stars themselves and we have a new problem-light pollution...
...to stuff children with candy until they are sick...
Vol. 124 • December 1997 • No. 22
