This excerpt is taken from The Vital Art of Celebration, one of Venn’s special print resources. A Christmas essay, the book is a good companion for Advent (it’s also not a bad gift). But its insights run deeper than the yuletide season. John helps us to see why celebration is such a distinctive of the Church. Indeed, Christian celebration is a spiritual discipline, a habit of God’s people regardless of what is happening in the world around. It speaks to the radical nature of Christian faith: the confidence that “As troubling as our circumstances may become, all dark and evil things already have been made to stand in the light of the incarnation, the renewal—wholly God’s—of creation from within.” What follows here is the opening section of John’s essay. To read the rest, you can pick up a copy of The Vital Art of Celebration at the Venn store—Ed.
It wasn’t my best work. Loosely stacked in three-line stanzas, the punctuation replaced by large toothless gaps between words, the poem was as awkward as it was exuberant. My lecturer’s question was gently put, but pointed enough: “John,” he said, “Don’t you think you can have too much joy?” Still satisfied with my cleverly coded biblical references, and pleased about finding a use for such lovely words as “deference” and “aubade”, I was hurt. Sure, I’d used the actual word “joy” liberally—six times in only eight lines—but this was a poem about getting out of bed to greet the morning! Too much joy? How sad.
But that’s just the rub, isn’t it? The morning (for some of us) might be bright and dew-kissed, but a meaningful response to our human predicament requires more than an enthusiastic repetition of the word “joy”. And in these times, celebration in general has to give an account of itself: with such troubling years stacked immediately behind us, the celebrations of the Christian year sit awkwardly to present circumstances. Followers of Jesus, throughout the year, insist on rejoicing and celebration; and yet this seems at odds with reality. The question is perhaps quietly voiced but direct: “Don’t you think you can have too much joy?” With all that we face, how can we go about genuinely singing and speechifying, dancing and giving and feasting and resting and joying at Easter and Pentecost, Advent and Christmas? Even more pointedly, why is it that God’s people persist in rejoicing, even in grim times? Why is it that Paul and Silas—and so, so many like them in the years following—sing in prison, with the flesh of their backs raw and their feet in the stocks (Acts 16)? How can we—ought we to—practice the art of celebration in troubled times?
I suspect it’s because of the times that I’ve found myself spending time reading the words of an old friend. He is locked alone in a Berlin prison cell in 1943-44, writing letters to his parents and to close friends. His words, distant from me in time and space, have nevertheless been an encouragement. Here’s a Jesus follower, a pastor, imprisoned partly for his faith, in the midst of dire days for all, when food was becoming scarce and, each night, death fell from the sky like rain. And now, as he makes the best of things in his cell, Advent approaches and Christmas comes around again. What will Dietrich Bonhoeffer have to say about rejoicing, about celebration? Will public scruple and internalised censure temper any seasonal exuberance? Will he remain stoically sober (“don’t be too joyful, now!”) or will he seek escape and, alleviating the tension between air raids, cram himself with the treats sent by family? He’s well aware of the challenge: “What man is there among us,” Bonhoeffer writes, “who can give himself with an easy conscience to the cultivation of music, friendship, games or happiness?” ¹
Reading between the lines of his letters, Bonhoeffer’s response is to celebrate as fully as circumstances allow and to do so with deepening understanding. I imagine him lingering over the Scriptures in an awareness of the communion of saints, remembering St Paul’s irrepressible encouragement from a Roman prison: “Rejoice in the Lord always! I will say it again: Rejoice!” (Phil 4:4). And as I think of Bonhoeffer remembering St Paul, Eugene Peterson eyeballs me: “Celebrate God all day, every day. I mean, revel in him!” ² Dietrich picks up his pen. “For a Christian there is nothing peculiarly difficult about Christmas in a prison cell,” he writes to his parents. “I dare say it will have more meaning and will be observed with greater sincerity here in this prison than in places where all that survives of the feast is its name.” ³
Such a bald affirmation of the freedom and significance of Christian celebration can’t be skipped over. You might discount it as the untruth or sentimentality of a desperate man. But having read and re-read Bonhoeffer’s letters, I’m disinclined to: there are moments of evident strain in his letters, but this is not one of them. My hunch, rather, is that Bonhoeffer is discovering anew what the people of God have found through the ages: that in the midst of desolation true Christmas celebration rises up to testify to what is deeply true about the world, about humanity, and about God.
¹ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter to a friend, 23rd January 1944, Letters and Papers from Prison, (London: Fontana Books, 1966), p.65.
² Philippians 4:4, paraphrased by Eugene Peterson, The Message, (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1995), p.495.
³ Bonhoeffer, Letter to his parents, 17th December 1943, Letters and Papers from Prison, p.36.
