If we can remember how to feast and fast, there will be Blue Mondays no more

Today is “Blue Monday”, allegedly the saddest day of the year. And it’s no wonder. There’s hardly any sunlight or greenery outside these days, but you’re not allowed fairy lights or Christmas trees inside either. You look at the calendar and you’re scarcely halfway through Winter, but there’s no chocolate hiding just behind each date of a cadbury calendar anymore. You pop open a stray box of Quality Street, but there’s only those blue ones left. 

Yes, you and your Quality Streets are suffering from the post-Christmas blues. There was all that exciting buildup of festive spirit throughout December that fizzled out on the afternoon of Christmas day. All the presents had been opened and wrapping paper laid bare all over the floor, but there was nothing you could do about it because half a turkey and a Christmas pudding were pinning you to the sofa. At which point, or soon after, you began dreading the two months of Christmasless winter which lay ahead.  

Better the highs and lows than the flatline

Part of our problem, I suspect, is that Christmas is the only feast day we really have left. Of course there used to be ‘Christmas-tide’, ending on Epiphany (5th Jan), but that seems to have been mostly forgotten too. These days, people hardly even make a meal of Easter. The medieval peasant in England would have had around 70 feast days throughout the year. But without these holidays (holy-days) interspersed throughout the year, all our festivity slides towards the back end of the year and puddles in December.  

Indeed, there is something inherently otherworldly about both fasting and feasting.

Except, it’s not as though we all live in austerity the rest of the year. Being rid of feast days, we have also been rid of the idea of fasting. Advent was once a season of penitence, but has since become a protracted celebration of shopping, soundtracked by the relentless hook, “I wish it could be Christmas every day.” But in forgetting about the fasting, we have also forgotten how to feast. 

Having lost sight of the heights and valleys in which we once lived, moved and had our being, we now live on a flat plane, deprived of festivities and the fasting which made those festivities sweet. A constant state of half-luxury now pervades our lives, meaning our blessings are no longer received as intrusions from the banquet of the world to come, but are simply taken for granted. 

Already but not yet

Indeed, there is something inherently otherworldly about both fasting and feasting. One who fasts rejects the cares and needs of the earthly life for the sake of the spiritual life. One who feasts puts ordinary life at a standstill, has no care for tomorrow, but dances, plays, makes sacrificial offerings, gives recklessly. Holidays are thus ‘set apart’ from ordinary life; they remind us that our true life lies elsewhere, even as they recapitulate the simultaneous pointlessness and profundity of our existence on earth. They can be, like Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus’ feet with her finest ointment and wiping them with her hair, a holy splurge, at once senseless and beautiful. 

So much of Jesus’ life as recorded in the gospels, we might note, revolves around festivals. In John’s gospel, his ministry begins in earnest with providing wine at a wedding feast. He then visits Jerusalem four times - once for a “festival of the Jews” in John 5, once for Hanukkah in chapter 10, and twice for the Passover feast in chapters 2 and 12. 

The other gospels provide a similar picture. In Mark 2, Jesus is interrogated by the Pharisees as to why, when they fast, he and his followers eat and drink. “The wedding-guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they?”, answers Jesus. “As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.” 

The Christian cycles of fasting and feasting are, then, an expression of our experience of the presence of Christ, which is, to use the cliche, “already, but not yet.” Christ, we are told, is within and amongst his followers; yet we look forward to meeting him one day with unveiled faces. In fasting we await, and in feasting we declare, the day we will be with Christ in the company of all the saints. Not only declare, but bring it, in some way, to earth.  

A glimpse into the garden

In feasting, just as Jesus did in the 1st century and the church has done since, one is not luxuriating in the excess of this world. One is, sometimes in mirth, other times in solemnity, but always in joy, looking forward to the banquet of the life to come. Yet while looking forward to the eternal, the church also embraces the seasonality of life on earth, in which there is a time for everything.

What the church does in the temporal can at once point to and reveal, by fragments, the eternal. Feast days cut a door into our calendar, opening onto an evergreen garden, lying somewhere not overlooked by any window in this our grey, winter city.