Song of the Week - "Celebration" - Kool and the Gang [Ordinary Time]
No. 8 in the Song of the Week Series (Ordinary Time)
The Seventh post in “The Song of the Week” series.
The previous post in this series:
(and you can link back to the previous ones from it)
7. Song of the Week - "Have a Little Faith" - Mavis Staples
Music sits pretty close to the intersection of the key themes of this Substack: reading/writing, community, and formation. The songs we sing are deeply formative for us as persons and communities. So, I share a song here each week that has been formative for me, and offer a couple of brief thoughts that connect it with this particular week (in the church calendar and/or natural year) and explore why it is significant for me. Let me know what you think…
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It’s been a grueling week! (A long story not worth rehashing here, but involving used car salesmen living up to the very worst of that stereotype). Anyway… All that finally got resolved yesterday, and it was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders!
Plus, it’s Father’s Day weekend, and with the Juneteenth holiday and a couple of strategically-taken days off, it’s also a 5-day weekend! Lots to celebrate here!!!!
So this week, I’m dropping a classic celebration song (arguably the classic celebration song) as our song of the week.
In many church communities we don’t celebrate enough — like really celebrate, with food and singing and maybe even dancing. Earlier this year, Jeni and I both turned 50, and our church came together to help us celebrate, and that night was one of the best nights in recent memory. People of all ages eating and talking and singing and dancing, and just enjoying being together. The fact that it was a birthday party was almost irrelevant, just an excuse to celebrate, to enjoy being together and to celebrate the goodness of our life together and the Giver of that life.
Richard Foster has written in a number of places about the practice of celebration (and I’d argue that although readers tend to focus on the disciplines/practices in his classic book Celebration of Discipline, the word celebration in the title often gets short shrift.) Here is one short meditation on celebration by Foster. In it, he writes:
Celebration gives us perspective on ourselves. We are not nearly as important as we often think we are, and celebration has a way of bringing us the needed balance. The high and the mighty and the weak and the lowly all celebrate together. Who can be high or low at the festival of God? Together the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless all share in the goodness of God. There is no leveler of caste systems like festivity.
What are some ways that your church celebrates together? What song(s) do you associate with these celebrations?
This post is made freely available to Substack readers, but if you appreciate The Conversational Life, please consider helping to sustain our work with a paid subscription ( $5/month or $50/year ).