“Consciously or subconsciously Christians have accepted the whole ethos of our joyless and business-minded culture. They believe that the only way to be taken ‘seriously’ by the ‘serious’ – that is, by modern man – is to be serious, and, therefore, to reduce to a symbolic ‘minimum’ what in the past was so tremendously central in the life of the Church – the joy of a feast. The modern world has relegated joy to the category of ‘fun’ and ‘relaxation.’ It is justified and permissible on our ‘time off’; it is a concession, a compromise. And Christians have come to believe all this, or rather they have ceased to believe that the feast, the joy have something to do precisely with the ‘serious problems’ of life itself, and may even be the Christian answer to them.”
– Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 53.