Virtue Quest

I love etymology, the study of the origins of words. But it doesn’t take much study to discover that “holiday” is just “holy day” mashed together. Now, that’s easy to swallow for a religious person. There are even some who deliberately abstain from the shopping and decorations and caroling and what not that pervade the last couple months of every year, focusing instead on the particular celebrations of their religion. But is there anything genuinely or universally holy about the “holiday” season?

Holy days in the secular world?

I mentioned in an earlier post that Thanksgiving really strikes me as a holy day. And, being a Catholic, Christmas is of course a big deal for me and my family. But these two days are, I think, holy in very different ways.

Thanksgiving is holy in a kind of universal way, while Christmas is holy in a very specific and particular way.

See, Thomas Aquinas proposes that religion is a natural virtue, not one that depends on any particular creed or belief. He considers it a sub-virtue of justice. He doesn’t mean by this that a court should find you guilty of not spending enough time on your knees or of missing church on Sunday. But he does mean that everybody has a duty to respect and honor the holy and the divine.

And one of the main ways of honoring the holy and divine is through festivals and celebrations. We give thanks for the good things that we have received, and we give credit to the power beyond ourselves which has given those good things to us.

Even if we don’t all agree on the name that power goes by, it is a matter of justice to acknowledge that we have not and could not make or earn or create all the good things we have by our own power. And that’s something that even atheists and Baptists should be able to agree on.

And they do: by celebrating Thanksgiving Day.

Religious religion

Christmas, on the other hand, is a particularly Christian holiday. It’s only because the vast majority of the early American colonists came from Christian backgrounds that government offices and banks and most other businesses close for Christmas.

For myself, I celebrate Christmas because I believe that God became human and was born of the Virgin Mary roughly two millenia ago. I know Jews who celebrate Hanukkah because they believe that God once blessed their temple with light and continues to bless their people. I don’t know people of other faiths well enough to speak for them, but I expect that they celebrate various feasts for similar reasons: because they see some particular way that the holy and divine has touched this world, and perhaps has touched their lives directly.

The virtue of religion

By setting aside time, and by celebrating with special foods and with songs or dancing or trees or costumes or any kind of ritual – by dedicating some part of our lives to religious celebration, we build the habit of keeping in touch with those parts of reality which are beyond our ability to know completely, the source of good and the ground of our existence. This is the virtue of religion: to acknowledge and to honor the holy and divine.