Why Are Most Religious Events Celebrations?
Read more articles on Religion and Let Me Share With You.January 2, 2007
Posted by Karen Amato Schwartz
January 2, 2007
Posted by Karen Amato Schwartz
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About a week ago, a reader wrote to me about how he has noticed that religious events have become celebrations, and I promised that I would do a piece about it.
Well, it’s hard to ignore the truth; except for some Judaic holidays and perhaps Ramadan, it’s hard to find much seriousness connected with religious-based events of significance.
A case in point is Christmas and Easter in the Christian calendar. Both are deeply spiritual for followers, but we “celebrate” in manners far removed from the original occasion. How does Mary’s labor of the Christian Messiah correlate to placing inflatable snowmen in front yards or collecting reindeer novelties? How does this Messiah’s death and believed resurrection connect to dark chocolate bunnies and white chocolate crosses?
And that’s just in this country. There are probably dozens of festivities in other parts of the world that are equally questionable regarding their tie with a religious holiday. Egg hunts, gift giving, card sending, special foods-all have their place in spreading generosity and making the occasion special, but their relativity to the spiritual reason for the event leaves much to be desired.
Obviously, not being a sociologist, I can’t point to the psychology of why we as a society need to have regular reasons to celebrate, but the major religious occasions offer good opportunity. Any excuse to party, I guess. It’s just funny that we celebrate in almost the same ways for secular holidays as we do for religious…consider that we buy candy for almost every special occasion, or cakes with words printed in icing. We now give gifts for almost every holiday-to almost everyone. It’s largely due to the ingenuity of sales professionals that we buy up trinkets for every occasion. What would Easter be without colored plastic grass and plastic eggs, and how many children think of those things first instead of the reason behind Easter in the first place?
We do so much based on auto-pilot without thinking, and we fall prey to the world’s materialism. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to put aside all of this in order to make religious holidays truly religious once again? Do you know what? We couldn’t. It would never happen because now we’re spoiled. Our awareness of our holidays gets validation from Hallmark and Kmart. I, for one, would love to take a trip back through time to a place before commercialism. For then, even if folks were celebrating during religious festivals, at least things wouldn’t be quite so cheesy…
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