The festival is nothing new. Neither old nor new it is elemental. […] One thinks of the harvest festival blessing the year’s yield and completeness, of Easter transfiguring the sacramental earth with jubilating, spring shouts of renewal. […]
In the modern rationalisation of time the weekend gets its instrumental justification from the workweek; working time possesses the primacy. In the festival, by contrast, we experience time as other. Festival time does not simply borrow its meaning from worktime. […] For modernity, efficient work, aided by powerful technology, is the primary transformer of nature. With the festival, however, nature and the human are transformed in a different way such that everyday work becomes a secondary mode of transformation. The original power of being itself is festal.
William Desmond, Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of Being and Mind (pp. 301-2)