so, I am reading "To Be Told" by dan allender, and I read this part and thought of you lovely village people and all the parties we have. I don't know if our ideas of parties specifically came from mr. allender, but nonetheless, pretty cool. here is what he says:
"We must let the juices of a good ending sweeten the morsel of a story. Endings are not merely times for reflection; they are also seasons for celebration. We are to dance in the arms of a good ending. One of our greatest failures in our busy, driven culture is that we don't celebrate the temporary untying of a complex narrative. We are too busy to take a break, so we settle in front of a television screen to see other people enter a denouement after their twenty-six minutes of 'complexity.'
What is your style of celebrating an ending? Do you only throw large parties after someone graduates, gets married, or dies? If so, then all the other endings in your story are lost in the wake of another day's busyness. Perhaps one of the reasons you and I don't party well is that we don't know what to do with the tragedies that linger our life. Nor do we know what to do with the moments that shattered us, even as we look back after the damage has been richly, though not completely, resolved. When do we celebrate a denouement related to the struggle of being overweight, unwanted, angry, lonely, fearful, or ashamed? We don't. Can you imagine receiving an invitation to a party: 'Join me in a celebration of no longer believing I am stupid'? Or how would you go about inviting friends to join you to celebrate the richness of having encountered a huge moment of crisis and choosing not to withdraw or blame yourself but instead to tackle it and enjoy a great outcome?
We don't allow endings to be noted, let alone celebrated. Therefore we never allow denouement to invigorate the upward movement of a new story. And we will only love our story to the degree that we see the glory that seeps through our most significant shattering. To see that glory, we must enter into and read our tragedies with confidence that they will end better than we could ever imagine."
soo... when is the next party? |