[AI translation] Imagine that the following happens at a ball. Sensual, devotional music is playing. Red, yellow and all sorts of mood lighting casts the great hall in twilight. The couples are circling in a swirling confusion, the air is hot - and suddenly the music stops, the dancers stop, and in the sudden silence someone on the platform reads out in a loud voice from the Bible this verse: "Do not be unbelievers in a half-empty yoke, for what has Christ in common with Belial? You are the temple of the living God, cleanse yourselves from all uncleanness of body and soul. (2Cor 6:16) Many would be upset and feel that their fun had been spoiled, and weeks later they would still look back with bitterness at the inappropriate words that spoiled the party.And indeed: what is the Bible doing at a ball? What need is there for the word of God at a dance? Nothing! Nothing indeed! And it is precisely from this judgment that it has no place that we can see how much the carnival has nothing to do with God, how alien a world the carnival world is from the world of God! So alien, so different are these two, as the Scripture says: as truth and falsehood, as light and darkness, as Christ and Belial, as believer and unbeliever. Behold, this image alone is enough to show how unchristian carnival is!
But now let us imagine another picture! At dawn, a merry, merry party is making its way home. They are giggling, tumbling with unsteady balance, their serpentine ribbons around their necks floating, their braided hair still full of confetti. Tight tails, expensive evening silk dresses crinkle on their tired bodies. Two men come face to face, two half-frozen Hungarians, just back from the Russian front. Their clothes pierced by the enemy bullets, their souls battered by the enemy excitement, they support each other, dead tired. The merry party suddenly sober up, quietly shame to the depths of their souls, and almost imperceptibly scramble out of the way.
Only those who don't want to notice fail to see how untimely Carnival is now, in the winter of 1942 in this country. However true it may be that the suffering man steals pleasure where he can, however true it may be that when times are hardest, when the heaviest storm clouds are gathering in the sky, it is precisely then that men seek with the most thirsty thirst for intoxication and mirth. According to historians, there have never been such famous daredos in this country as in the sixteenth century, after the Battle of Mohács. Yet it is true that dancing and merrymaking does not suit a country's society when hundreds and thousands of its citizens are far away defending domestic peace and order with their lives!
The question may be on the minds of many: why the Church's traditional hostility to Carnival? The youth, the young people demand fun by right, so why shouldn't the young people have fun? What objection can the Christian churches have to this? I have often heard the argument that Jesus went to the wedding at Cana! The half-Christians want to justify their debauched lives with the misunderstood story of the wedding at Cana. The Lord Jesus did not go to this wedding to have fun there, but to testify to God's miraculous power there and to save souls there. He did not sit down at table with sinners and tax collectors to mingle with them and approve of their useless lives, but to heal them as a physician. Nevertheless, let me emphasise very strongly that our Church does not want to be the enemy of fun, but of carnival. Someone was asked the other day why he did not go to church nowadays. - It is carnival, he said, shocked. - And you don't have to go to church at carnival? - He was asked. - Of course not, he replied, because carnival is officially a time for merrymaking!
Oh, we condemn the carnival not only because of the noticeable drop in church attendance during this period, but also because on Sunday mornings many Reformed people sleep at home after the exhausting fatigue of dancing all night, and the ones who do go to church sleep off the fatigue of the previous night's revelry - but because carnival institutionalises our already existing waning of what we might call shared-heartedness or seasonal Christianity. Every man is inclined to enter the kingdom of God with only one foot and remain out in the world with the other. Anyway, we are inclined to care for God only on certain days and hours of our lives, and to live our own lives at other times. We already have the instinct to divide our lives into two parts: a secular life and a religious life, a life dedicated to ourselves and a life dedicated to God. So we almost have two different lives, two separate selves: one better and one worse, one more serious and one more casual. And carnival makes this division legitimate, institutional. It also artificially divides the calendar in the way semi-Christians like to imagine their lives: after a few weeks dedicated to God, there are a few weeks dedicated to the prince of the carnival of the fly - after the silence of Advent and Christmas devotions, so that one does not get too bored with all the devotions and so that one's life does not turn sour in the presence of God, there must come a period when repressed passions can let off steam at will. Then, lest God should be too angry with them, they return to God again in a great Lenten silence. So what is carnival? Seasonal Christianity, seasonal religionism, unconscious exposure or open admission that there are times and events in our lives in which we do not allow God to have a say!
We are also opposed to carnival because it is not Christian in its origins, but has developed under purely pagan influences, with pagan thinking. Because in the Middle Ages the fasting regulations, which began on Ash Wednesday, were particularly strict, the people said: let us first have fun, eat, drink and feast! At first, only one day was set aside for this feasting, later it began on the Sabbath, and finally the period from the Epiphany to Ash Wednesday was devoted to revelry. The model for this was taken from the pagan Romans of old. They used to hold great feasts in honour of Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry, at which they would get drunk, put on masks and, under cover of them, practise a great deal of revelry. This was the model on which the present-day carnival customs developed and flourished, so much so that our Reformed ancestors in the sixteenth century called carnival the devil's feast. It is recorded that a Turkish envoy, who was in Vienna at the imperial court at carnival time, suggested to the Turkish emperor that if he ever wished to wage war against the Christians, he should do so at carnival time, for that was when the Christians were in the habit of going mad. So this is how outsiders judge our carnival.
Behold, this is why our church is against the carnival. But that doesn't mean that it is against fun, merriment and merriment! In fact, there is no other way of life in the world as cheerful, happy, joyful, carefree as Christianity! Nothing is further from Jesus than to soure and dry the souls of his followers! On the contrary, He came to make us happy, truly happy. He gave a whole sermon on how happy His followers are. In the first sentences of the Sermon on the Mount, eight times in a row, He calls those who live with Him happy, and happy in all circumstances. The reason there are so many unhappy people in the world is because they are not looking for happiness where it is: in Jesus Christ!
Nor is He an enemy of fun, He just sees it in a different context than the world does. There is a general craze for entertainment in the world today. A lot of people live, work and toil so that when they've thrown away their day job, they'll have enough money to have fun. And according to the ethics of Christ, the Christian man should have fun so that he can be rested and refreshed to resume his vocation. Yes: Christ is against all entertainment that man engages in because it is a social duty or because he wants to escape his problems and his conscience. Christ is against all entertainment that tires, exhausts, makes one less fit for the next day's work - but makes it a duty for his followers to have entertainment that makes them physically more rested, spiritually more flexible.
And there is another aspect: the aspect of our Hungarianness. If one can no longer imagine a calendar without a carnival and a carnival without balls, why should our youth be taught to revel in a pastime alien to the Hungarian soul? Why can one only be in the mood for negro music, for bloodcurdling negro dancing, for beauty contests selling human flesh - and why can one not imagine a gathering where the organizers teach the audience old, forgotten Hungarian folk customs, beautiful ancient Hungarian melodies, the most ancient and precious product of the Hungarian folk soul? Why can't we have fun in a way that makes us stronger in our Hungarian consciousness?!
And finally, the most important thing! "You are the temple of the living God", says the Word. The church is symbolically the dwelling place of God, the tabernacle, the place where God is present, filled with the Holy Spirit. As the Apostle Paul says in another passage, "Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who dwells in you?' (1 Cor 6:19) Just as we cannot use the church for worship one day, for wine-tasting another, for a dance on a third day - for that would be to profane the house of God - so it is not possible to be God's on Sunday and the world's on weekdays - devout at Advent and Lent, merry at carnival. The church belongs always and entirely to God! Only things that serve the glory of God can happen in it.
What God means by this is that every day and every action I do must be entirely his. He has the right to make a total claim on me, because He has paid a great price for me: He has paid the ransom for me with His life in the person of Jesus Christ. It is not only the time I spend in church that is his, but also the time I spend working, resting, having fun! A Christian man is serene in Lent and serious at carnival. The Christ-follower also goes out to amusement, to merry, cheerful company, holding the hand of God, and can amuse himself with a clear conscience until he has to let go of that holy hand.
Many people ask me whether it is lawful to dance, whether it is lawful for a serious Christian man to do this or that, to go here or there. Such a question usually reveals that the person does not love Jesus enough: he is looking for where to stretch Christian self-discipline, what more could be retained of the way of life in a world without God. Everything is free for the Christian man that does not change the church character of his body and soul, that does not desecrate the temple of the Holy Spirit.
But there is one thing carnival is good for: to shame! Thus, in the light of the Word, it made him realize how light is confused with darkness, truth with falsehood, Christ with the Gospel, the temple of God with idols. In our times we need not a carnival, but introspection and prayer! It is not in vain that we have a carnival, if, seeing our half-hearted lives divided between Christ and Satan, we are moved to our hearts by the apostle Paul's call: 'Beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all uncleanness, both physical and spiritual, carrying out our sanctification in the fear of God' (2 Cor 7:1).
Amen.
Date: 1 February 1942.