Festivals:

Keep the Festival

(Second Corinthians 5:8)

In The Silver Chair, when the children finally climb out of the underworld, they find themselves in the midst of one of those Narnia festivals. They hear “wild music, intensely sweet and yet just the least bit eerie too.” It is the music of The Great Snow Dance performed every year on the first moonlit night when there is snow on the ground. Lewis describes it all:

On fine nights when the cold and the drum-taps, and the hooting of the owls, and the moonlight have got into their wild, woodland blood and made it even wilder, they will dance till daybreak. I wish you could see it for yourselves. (p. 232)

There’s something to be said for keeping festival (1Cor 5:8):

Therefore, let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of authenticity and truth.

Thanksgiving throws us into the Festal Calendar: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, and Easter. Like the Great Snow Dance, Easter also has something to do with the moon—the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. When we do it right, “with authenticity and truth,” not only is God honored; but, humanity as well. At such times, when we enter fully into the festival with our songs and celebration, the gospel story works its way deep inside us and we become authentically human.