There are two things our generation has learned to do well. We work hard and we play hard. One thing we may not do with as much consciousness, as keen an awareness, it seems, is to celebrate just as intently as we work, just as well as we play.

Celebrations are the firework moments of life that bring with them a sense of what it means to have become another 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.

The very idea of “celebration,” in fact, has, in the Western world, been a gift of the church to us.

In feudal times, the celebration of “feast days”—celebrations of the great moments of the faith and the great holy people who had once given light to our lives—punctuated all the great seasons of the year. They took us deeper and deeper into what it meant to talk about life as sacred and so to live a spiritually-centered life.

Today, many of those same feasts have been secularized to the point of invisibility. Christmas has become Santa Claus to many, Easter is a bunny, All Saints Day is an orgy of ghosts and demons. The old ethnic feasts that celebrated heritage as well as sanctity have disappeared. Even national feasts such as the Fourth of July and Labor Day get more and more mute every year. So who are we and where have we come from and what matters now?

Without answers to those questions, our spirits go dry. The humdrum sets in. The ennui overtakes us. The future sinks to grey.

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.

What we celebrate in life tells us what is important to us: time with family, time in the water, time on a mountain trail, time in the garden, time simply to sit and 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 in life 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.

—from The Monastic Way 2016 by Joan Chittister, slightly edited