Whether we are working or playing, we do it to win. We give it everything we have: We prepare and practice, we plan and strategize, we cherish our injuries with pride. And we should. But what we should not do is confuse hard work or hard play with celebration.

Celebration is something else completely. Celebrations are the firework moments of life that bring with them a sense of what it means to have become a new part of ourselves. Celebration brings sparkle to a life too often lived in dull colors, in twilight, in darkness.

Always, always, they deepen the very meaning of life for us as we go along.

Celebrations are what help us to glimpse, to recognize, who we really are and want to be. At our deepest moments in life, as part of our highest aspirations. Without asking these questions, our spirits go dry. The humdrum sets in. The ennui overtakes us. The future sinks to gray.

The celebration of life–of what it is to be alive, to be in love, to be on the right path as we go–is an art. It is an antidote to depression. It renews a sense of depth and gives life a more enduring measure of meaning.

How we celebrate tells us what is important to us in life: time with the family, time by the water, time on a mountain trail, time in the garden, time to listen to music, time to stare out the window and realize how good this thing called life has really been. That is “celebration.” Those are the moments when we are closest to God, closest to the awareness of life. It is celebration that really teaches us what it means to be alive rather than simply living through it.

Wednesday, July 1: Psychotherapists now tell clients whose sense of the value of life has escaped them to write down, every night, three things about the day that were good. The hope is to enable people to celebrate life again. Try it for a month.

Thursday, July 2: Not to celebrate anything is to doom ourselves to find nothing worth living for at all. We condemn ourselves to a life sentence of meaninglessness.

Friday, July 3: What we celebrate is a mark of our deepest longings in life, our highest aspirations.

Saturday, July 4: “Everything in life is created from moment to moment,” Francis Lucille writes. Every fourth of July is different. Every birthday we’re different. Every New Year the world is different. Learn to celebrate those differences and your life will forever be an adventure of goodness in process.

Sunday, July 5: The question is not what we should celebrate, but what shouldn’t we celebrate. Every occasion is an occasion. It’s not the date on the calendar that matters, it’s the cognizance in our own soul of the amount of goodness around us that is in question.

Monday, July 6: When we find ourselves complaining that we have nothing to celebrate, it’s important to realize that it isn’t life that is the problem, it’s the blindness in our own souls that needs to be cured. As Robert Brault says of celebrations: “There are exactly as many occasions in life as we choose to celebrate.”

Tuesday, July 7: Here’s a tip for how to know when to have a celebration: Just when it seems that there is nothing to celebrate at all. Because that’s when we need it most.

Wednesday, July 8: The difference between very poor people and very rich people is often that, because they have so little, the poor celebrate everything they get and, because they have so much, the rich find there is nothing to celebrate at all.

Thursday, July 9: If we wait to celebrate only the culmination of what we seek in life, we will never celebrate at all. “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road,” Barbara Hoffman says, “and celebrate the journey.”

Friday, July 10: The tragedy of life is to allow it to go by without appreciating something in every single day, without celebrating its fundamental goodness to us.

Saturday, July 11: Whatever you’re waiting for before you’ll embrace where you are and what you’re doing at this moment is nothing but a mirage. Life is what we have right now. At this moment. Here. Celebrate it.

Sunday, July 12: To celebrate my own life is important but it is also important to help other people celebrate theirs. It is a sign to us all that every life is important to the joy and purpose of our own.

Monday, July 13: We keep waiting for something big enough to celebrate. But we already have it. It’s called life.

Tuesday, July 14: Take time to recognize what you find good in life and you’ll soon figure out how to repeat it. As Thomas J. Peters says of it, “Celebrate what you want to see more of.”

Wednesday, July 15: Remember that we are our own life’s resources. “I celebrate myself and sing myself,” the poet Walt Whitman wrote. The message is plain: It is learning to rejoice in what we are, rather than struggling to be what we are not, that is really the apex of human celebration.

Thursday, July 16: The joy and satisfaction we don’t get out of life is what we have not put into it.

Friday, July 17: Some people work hard at forgetting where they came from and what got them here. Others know that it is precisely where they came from that got them here. “It’s always good to remember where you came from and celebrate it,” Anthony Burgess writes.

Saturday, July 18: It’s easy to go through life grim and work-oriented and predictable. But it’s ecstatic to go through life loving and laughing and applauding the present. “Celebration,” Jonathan Lockwood Huie says, “is its own road to happiness.”

Sunday, July 19: Celebration is the quality that requires us to wake up to the present–and bless it.

Monday, July 20: It isn’t difficult to complain. After all, everything in life can always be better. But it is difficult to ignore life’s sweet, small pleasures and continue to insist we’re human.

Tuesday, July 21: Why celebrate on a bad day? Because tomorrow will be different, that’s why. And anyway, why not? As the poet Lu-Yu writes, “The clouds above us come together and disperse./The breeze in the courtyard departs and returns. Life is like that, so why not relax?/Who can keep us from celebrating?”

Wednesday, July 22: To be holy does not require us to be dour. It does require us to be awake to the God around us everywhere.

Thursday, July 23: To forget to celebrate is to forget to imitate the God who created us and then relaxed and said, “That’s good.”

Friday, July 24: We act as if celebration were time off from life when actually to celebrate is to live life to the fullest. “Celebration,” the artists Corita Kent and Jan Stewart wrote, “is a human need that we must not, and cannot, deny.”

Saturday, July 25: Learning to celebrate life in its smallest moments is an acquired skill. Without it we can only limp through life.

Sunday, July 26: When we never celebrate life, when we take everything in life for granted, we die a little every day. But when we learn to applaud the grass as it grows and the rain as it pours and darkness for its gift of faith, we find ourselves charged with the electricity of life. “Life,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “is a festival only to the wise.”

Monday, July 27: We do not come into life celebrating. We come into life wailing. Celebration is a cultivated taste learned only through suffering, but without it we never really live. “Trust joy and embrace it,” Emerson also writes. “You will find you dance with everything.”

Tuesday, July 28: To be born is to be asked to celebrate, to grow in awareness of the presence of God in the smallest of moments, to know the goodness of God.

Wednesday, July 29: Celebration is the proof that we have come to distinguish the act of breathing from the gift of being alive. Somewhere it is written, “When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. And when life is bitter, say thank you and grow.”

Thursday, July 30: Learning to celebrate life is one of the best lessons a person can learn. We need to teach children to celebrate the good things in life so that they see their responsibility to maintain them.

Friday, July 31: Ann Landers, the great advice columnist, wrote once, “At every party there are two kinds of people–those who want to go home and those who don’t. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.” She didn’t say how to solve it. I do–be the one who enjoys it.

LET’S SHARE OUR THOUGHTS
The following discussion questions, Scripture echo, journal prompts, and prayer are meant to help you reflect more deeply on The Monastic Way. Choose at least two suggestions and respond to them. You may do it as a personal practice or gather a group interested in sharing the spiritual journey.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Do you celebrate well? What kinds of moments spur you to celebrate, and what do you do to mark the occasion? How do these celebrations affect you?

2. Which daily quote in The Monastic Way is most meaningful to you? Why? Do you agree with it? Disagree? Did it inspire you? Challenge you? Raise questions for you?

3. After reading The Monastic Way, what is one way that you can put Sister Joan’s teachings into practice in your own life?

4. Joan Chittister uses other literature to reinforce and expand her writing. Find another quote, poem, story, song, art piece, novel that echoes the theme of this month’s Monastic Way.

5. On July 27, Sister Joan writes, “Celebration is a cultivated taste learned only through suffering, but without it we never really live.” Do you agree with her? What do you feel has taught you to celebrate? Do you think that your experiences of suffering have helped or hurt your ability to celebrate?

JOURNAL PROMPTS

Prompt 1: Here are a few statements from this month’s Monastic Way. Choose one that is most helpful to you and journal with it.

• What we celebrate is a mark of our deepest longings in life, our highest aspirations.

• To forget to celebrate is to forget to imitate the God who created us and then relaxed and said, “That’s good.”

• We need to teach children to celebrate the good things in life so that they see their responsibility to maintain them.

Prompt 2: Spend a few minutes with this photograph and journal about its relationship to this month’s Monastic Way. You can do that with prose or a poem or a song or....

SCRIPTURE ECHO

God shall rescue the peoplefrom the hand of their oppressor.

Shouting, they shall climb the heights of Zion, and come streaming to God’s blessings: the grain, the wine and the oil, the sheep and the oxen.

They shall be like watered gardens; never again shall they mourn. Then all shall make merry and dance, the young as well as the old.

“I, the God of Blessings,
Will turn their mourning into joy, will comfort them in their sorrow.
I will lavish my people with choice portions, filling them with my blessings.

Jeremiah 31:11-14

PRAYER

Be not lax in celebrating
Be not lazy in the festive service of God.
Be ablaze with enthusiasm.
Let us be an alive burning
offering before the altar of God.

––St. Hildegard of Bingen