But celebration is itself an image of something more than itself. We can only celebrate, I think, if we live in a world other than the one we claim to have made by and for ourselves, over against the world that is. Envy refuses to acknowledge the good that we see in others. Pride refuses to acknowledge any other world but our own, one in which we, not God, give all the meaning and all the norms. We cannot really celebrate in such a world of our own exclusive making, and in fact there are no celebrations in self-contained worlds.
Celebration includes the surprise that the world makes sense.
The Great Dance . . . There was no time when we did not rejoice before His face as now. The dance which we dance is at the center and for the dance all things were made. There is, I think, no way to describe the meaning of celebration better than this, though Plato and Aristotle, in their own ways, came remarkably close. We do not, in the end, celebrate ourselves, but we ourselves celebrate that which caused in us our capacity to praise.