A phrase beloved by a vocal segment of the theological avant-garde is “celebration of life.” Leading the celebration are such personages as Sister Corita Kent, Sam Keen, and Harvey G. Cox. They say that the Christian Church has bogged down in the “work ethic” and has so suppressed the human need for festivity that its ministry seems totally irrelevant to the rising generation.
Their proposal is that the Church take the lead in establishing a new, festive mood. In this new mood, the fantastic array of images and ideas that the electronic media bounce off our minds will be handled in a new way. Rather than deal with them rationally and scientifically, we are to confront them in a mood of festivity.
In his Feast of Fools Harvey Cox views festivity as a corrective to our present reluctance to do things symbolically. Our age has replaced symbol with technique, he says. Now it is imperative to break the rule of abstract ideas by returning to a free-floating form of liturgy that allegedly marked the group expression of pre-scientific man.
In analyzing festivity Cox finds three elements. The first is excess, which provides release from the usual structures of daily life and takes the celebrator beyond the usual conventional limits. Second is life-affirmation, a transcending of the negative aspects of life. Life is pronounced good, even in the presence of tragedy. Fantasy and festivity make it possible to affirm life even at the edge of death; evidence for this is found in the custom of holding wakes around the remains of the dead.
The third element in festivity is juxtaposition. Cox seems to mean that in festivity there is not only an involvement of the whole person but also the sharing of celebration with others. These others can contribute to the richness and uniqueness of this particular occasion, be it an anniversary, a public holiday, or an occasion of special group significance.
In the early part of Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse reminds us that “there are times when a whole generation is caught … between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.” The advocates of celebration as a way out have perceived at least part of the truth, that our age is confused. They quite probably overestimate the degree to which the adult generation differs from the generation of rising youth. While the young doubtless reach out for “depth of myth and symbol and the richness of mysticism.” one may question whether adults are as deeply under the tyranny of “the empirical scientific attitude” as the apologists for a rising counterculture assert.
Celebration cannot exist in a vacuum. There must be some content at its center, or it will degenerate into orgy and dionysianism. It seems to me that today’s youth are being shortchanged at this point. I am writing this column on board a ship in the mid-Atlantic, and here it is almost impossible to escape the sights and sounds of the discotheque. Clever musicians, supported by high-wattage amplifiers, seem to have persuaded a large proportion of the young that loudness plus endless repetition of rhythms means festivity. But nothing times two or times five is still nothing.
In addition to meaning, celebration ought to involve some measure of relaxation and enjoyment. It is at this point that the “rock subculture” appears substantively bankrupt. A recent blurb announcing the coming of a new rock group to Europe pictured the leader in a dark costume, his claw-like hand poised to pounce upon his guitar. The advertisement suggested that by the end of the program the only possible relief to guitarist and audience was found through destruction of the instrument. Celebration, anyone?
It is widely acknowledged that the rock subculture is a parasitic growth upon the consumer culture. It would collapse without the infrastructure of productionism, and upon the withdrawal of credit cards and or allowances paid by guilt-ridden parents. Those who can discern the signs of the times at all can see that such “celebrations” as Woodstock were well-planned exploitations of the rootless end-products of a permissive era by clever purveyors of utterly superficial forms of festivity.
When celebrative occasions like these fail to offer spiritual rootage beyond the material and the visible, in steps the occult. The magical, the mythical, the esoteric all promise to expand one’s vision beyond the limitations of time and space. That many of our young turn to the witches’ coven, or to its chemical counterpart of drugs, testifies not only to a broad dissatisfaction with mere technological modes of thinking and living but also to the bankruptcy of meaningless and orgiastic forms of celebration.
What has all this to say to the Christian Church in general and to evangelicals in particular? First, it suggests that the movement toward “celebration of life” has seized upon a basically valid element in its analysis of today’s mood. And it is entirely possible that too much has been made of the obligation, by all and at all times, to work. Perhaps because of this, multitudes have lost the ability to use leisure creatively or even to take time to reflect upon basic issues.
Again, it may be that the evangelical branch of Christendom has, with the best intentions, been too exclusively futuristic in its presentation of hope. After all, the charm of Disneyland, for adults as well as children, is its ability to transport the person to a world of fantasy and to almost-persuade that such a world could exist today. Perhaps evangelicals need to seek a biblical equivalent for the fantasy that the world presents—an equivalent that will help today’s men and women overcome the drabness of life and the menacing fear of meaninglessness.
The person with no hope and no future is as good as dead already. More important still, a merely futuristic “life in Christ” is a deformation of the Christian hope—a denial of the real heritage of the Christian in his Lord. Perhaps the Christian Church, and especially the evangelical wing, needs to discover some acceptable counterpart to the great liturgical “celebrations” of the Church of other eras.
Certainly this will not be found in rock-liturgy, or by dancing in the aisles, or by popping balloons during a “worship celebration.” But there is always something new in life for the vital Christian, something that ought to make him to come alive! Jesus Christ has visited our race to bring a better future into the present.
St. Paul left us a passage that may bear upon this question: “Be not drunk with wine in which is excess, but be filled with the Spirit.” Complex factors have inhibited mainline evangelicals in their efforts to fulfill this injunction. Perhaps the passage has something to say that will help us find an acceptable spiritual substitute for the excesses in which today’s advocates of celebration seem to find themselves trapped.
