From the very beginning of their history, Christians trembled  with excitement over every move and every breath of Christ Our Lord in the Gospels, and over every word and event of his life. They proclaimed them in what we call “celebrations” and “feasts”—a paradise.

Celebration is a game, a performance, a dance, about a person or an event of life. It is also the very person of the event we commemorate in solemn rites and expressions of joy, and with loving remembrance.

In celebrating them we raise them to their highest power of affirmation and ecstasy.

In the play of the feast, the celebration, there is a real presence in which the person or the event is ready to reveal itself to our human consciousness. It is Christ God who is the Real Presence, “everywhere present and filling all things” (as is said in the Byzantine Liturgy).

He is the breath of life, of all reality—hidden, discreet, but always there.

He is everywhere ready to be discovered, to invade us, to grip us, to carry us along and to enchant every fiber of our being.

It is in Real Presence that we realize our divine worth and the radiance of God until we explode into joy and “embrace even our enemies, calling them brothers” (from the Eastern Rite Matins of Easter).

To celebrate is to emphasize, to highlight and translate the ordinary into the extraordinary and fill the world with love, with joy, and with peace.

This is the play of the Divine and Holy Liturgy where some dust of the universe, bread and wine, is transformed into a divine matter. This is the game of the feast, of the Eucharistic Christ.

In celebrations we become secure and serene, and our inner conflicts are vanquished and resolved. We are peaceful. We respond to the gift of life with a loud “Amen”, “yes.”

We become free to skip and somersault; conflicting demands, fatalism and determinism find no entry. We become aware of being possessed by beauty, by a strength beyond our expectation, by God himself alone.

Joyous as the liturgy of the feasts of Christ may be, we, the players of the game of God, are suspended between heaven and earth, between mirth and tears, between joy and patience.

We are hesitant in our own ability to perform, but ever confident in the outcome, which is always the Good News of salvation.

We know that our existence is secure in God and consequently, joyous.

God created everything out of love, and he directed creation to the vision of himself. Human life came out of his heart, and our destiny is to return to him.

Everything in nature and in the human person is perfect joy. But we, who are entrusted with creation, can turn it into tragedy, because we are endowed with freedom, and freedom involves peril.

The actions of Christ are full of gaiety, of beauty. But when they are enacted by us, they are colored by elements of gravity and hesitancy. Everything we touch contains the possibility of a tragic side, a shadow; our actions may pollute it.

Our very life has this dual character: it is joyous, and it is tragic.

Joyous because we are secure in God; tragic because our freedom imperils it. In the liturgy we are, consequently, joyous and confident in God, but hesitant and fearful in ourselves.

From Celebration!, pp. 8-10, available from MH Publications.