Celebrations as a Yes to Life and the World

It is Kelly’s birthday today. I can’t be with her. Here I offer some thoughts about celebrating birthdays – in connection with the last two entries. Not as good as a birthday party, but...

To celebrate anything presupposes a certain kind of world.  You can’t say anything meaningful about celebrations – similar in this to eros and death – without reflecting on the whole world in the background.

A celebration is set apart from the everyday work world. A celebration is not an everyday occurrence. It is something special. Apart. It is an interruption of our normal experience of time.  I recall the absurdity of Monty Python’s depiction of Heaven: every day is Christmas. If every day were Christmas, there would be no Christmas. Celebrations only exist in a world in which the workday is the norm. No work, no celebration. Only work, however – and no celebration. Work would become a form of Hell without anything to celebrate.

The luxury class loses the reality of celebration. A life of luxury and ease thus seems to me a form of despair; in any case, a life in which celebrating life is not possible. Their pseudo-celebrations are more an expression of the horror of the vacuum than a genuine celebration of anything. There are so many reasons for seeing the life of a billionaire as a foretaste of Hell. Well, you can’t serve God and Mammon.

A celebration, however, cannot just be reduced to a non-work time. Work is typically ‘for the sake of’ something outside the work – to sustain biological and social life. It may be for the sake of the community or one’s clients. Celebrations have no external purpose. Everything that is part of a celebration is without practical purpose. There is an element of play involved.

 A celebration – to live through a good or special day. What is a good or special day? That depends on what you think a human being is. If you think it were better had human beings never existed, obviously there would be nothing to celebrate. There must, therefore, be something good in play. We celebrate only what is good. A celebration points to the best in what we are. A celebration points almost to a vision of a kind of paradise. A celebration is connected to a vision of human happiness.

 A celebration lives from a yes-saying to the world and to our lives in the world. If your world version is this:

Human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. It's a sick joke that the closer we get to truth, the further we get from meaning. The rational thing to do is to stop breeding and die out, or blow out our brains, but we're all too scared of the unknown.

then I can’t imagine you celebrating. This is something else essential to a genuine celebration. The celebration brings to our awareness an aspect of life that work cannot, at least most work cannot. I think that we may become aware that the world itself, in the face of human evil and misery, is something sublime, some “good, very good” as God says of it in Genesis. A celebration holds up a vision that negates evil and misery. Celebrating only makes sense in a world version that leaves conception space for the goodness of existence.

Birthdays in particular have this reference. If we were nothing more than exemplars of some original model – like a Ford Fiesta is at once a particular car but more fundamentally a replica of a model that can be reproduced – then birthday celebrations would make no sense. We don’t celebrate the birthdays of cows on a farm because they (in our conceptions of them anyway) lack the individuality that raises them above others of their kind. One cow is much like another. Nor do we grieve for them as we do when we lose a father or a mother. We don’t celebrate their lives in a funeral ritual or give them gravestones. The Romans did not celebrate the lives of the slaves they oppressed either. They felt no remorse for any evil done because it was not intelligible to them to see anything special in the human being as such. There was nothing that violated the nature of things to make property of other human beings - to use them as property. Raping a slave was one use of property among others. 

 Human beings are potentially always a new beginning. No human being has ever been like my daughter. No human being is like her now. No human being will ever be like her in the future. It is not that she is not similar to every other human being biologically. It is not that she does not share similarities with other people of her own culture. But her story is no one else’s story. Her words and her actions have the potential to make a difference in the world. If that is the way human beings are conceived in your world version, celebrating their advent into the world will make sense.

But there is also the sublime aspect. The faith that it is “good, very good” that she came into the world. That it is wonderful that she exists. That her life is a gift. All these expressions belong to the language of love. Love just is a yes-saying to the existence of the loved one. It is joy at seeing – and the celebration should bring this out if it is genuine – the true meaning of the loved one’s individual existence. That gets covered up in the everyday work world. Perhaps it must be covered up to see it in celebrating?

I recall as a boy experiencing another celebration – Christmas. One song went deep with me – O Holy Night. Rather one line in this song:

                                     Long lay the world

                                    In sin and error pining

                                    Til he appeared

                                    And the soul felt its worth.

 In my youthful mind, “he”, Jesus, was a divine gift of love. Love makes the soul feel its worth. The Romans – I had seen enough movies about them – had no idea of human worth. They had no idea that ‘it is good, very good’ that a particular human being was born. Their economy lived from slavery. They entertained themselves by watching men slaughter each other in the arena. They can and did inflict genocide on peoples that opposed them. Human worth for them was a function of being born into the aristocracy of a state powerful enough to impose its will on others. There was nothing loveable about human beings as such. I say: there was nothing loveable about the damn Romans. They were blind.

To celebrate a birthday is to allow to soul to feel its worth. That is sublime, though we tend to take it for granted in the everyday work-a-day world.