We made it! We’re here! I don’t know about you, but I can use a little revelry after this Lent. I’m not kidding. One of the things I think we forget to do as Catholics is party. I mean that sincerely. We spend so much of our time (and this blog) talking about troubling concerns in the world—as we should. Yet we are a living people, a community that knows how the sacred and the profane live together.
G. K. Chesterton, the Catholic intellectual and apologist was known to regular the Ye Olde Chesire Cheese pub in London. Why should that be strange as the novelist Jonathan Miles points out?
“Churches and bars both foster communities built around what sociologists like to call a ‘commonality of desire.’ As such, they are antidotes to loneliness, however noble, ignoble or divergent their ostensible purposes may be, and because both are dedicated to altering human consciousness — churches by exalting it, bars by pickling it — they tend to engender a sense of mystery and wonder” (New York Times, September 11, 2005).
James Joyce, one of the great failed Catholics of the 19th century (if you’re a fan of his, you know what I mean) captures this idea perfectly in his “A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man.” His fictional alter ego Stephen says, “[The writer] is a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of ever living life” (Portrait, 16). Stephen, and therefore Joyce, is using the language of transubstantiation, the process in which the bread becomes flesh and saying that we have the power to create moments that are not metaphors but actual essences of holiness—even at the pub!
Sunday dinner, the wedding, the Quinceañera—all celebrations and parties that become true worship. Now, I know the best way to ruin a joke is by explaining it, and the worst social events are forced ones. So I’ll stop explaining and just start experiencing. If the cross we carried in Lent is real, if the tears were, if Good Friday is experienced, then so is Easter. The joy—the Resurrection—must also be all too real. Let us claim the victory Jesus has won for us. Let’s spend the next 40 days converting our parties to exultation. Party like a Catholic and have a happy Easter.
I’ll be seeing you,
Elliot