The United States will be celebrating its second biggest holiday - after Christmas - tomorrow: Halloween.
By 'second biggest,' I mean as far as retailers and money spent. There will be parties, costumes, candy, more candy. Some start celebrating well before the actual Oct. 31 date. In my office building, at least one office allowed its employees to dress up last Friday, and I know there were parties all weekend, where people dressed up in costume and celebrated being something other than themselves.
As a kid, I loved Halloween because of the candy, and the chance to go out with friends, door-to-door, up and down streets and into neighborhoods where I rarely normally travelled. We used to map out exactly which neighborhoods and streets we wanted to "hit,'' seeing how we could work our way back-and-forth down one long street, cut through some woods into another neighborhood to hit that those houses, then cut back through a couple of back-yards to get back to the street leading us back to our own houses. We worked out the advance like Eisenhower planning the D-Day invasion of Europe.
We didn't spend a lot of time on costumes, maybe because usually either our parents made our costumes or we put something together ourselves, using stuff we found around the house. It used to be a cliché of putting white sheet over your head and cutting out eye-holes, but that wasn't a cliché in our neighborhood. Once I decided to go as a "thug," (which would be very non-politically correct these days, I guess). To my chagrin none of our neighbors got my costume; they thought I was just dressed normally.
Costumes have gotten more elaborate, both for kids and adults. For kids, you almost have to go buy a pre-packaged costume, and I admit they are cute. The real phenomenon, to me, is the growth in adult costumes. I guess my generation really never did grow up, and we set the tone for the next generations of people who love to dress up in any number of creative, original, outrageous, or sometimes obscene outfits.
As a Christian, I have struggled with Halloween. Is it a pagan holiday, and are we "celebrating" the powers of darkness by dressing up as ghosts, witches, devils, and all sorts of evil beings?
But it occurs to me that the holiday teaches us a few important lessons about the human condition.
One, many of us want to be something other than what we are. Oh, we may not really be unhappy in who we are, but isn't it fun to dress up like a superhero and, at least for one night, go out in disguise to do things that we might never do otherwise? We all have that nature within us, that we keep under control because we know it's not the right way to act; but every now and then its fun to let the "stranger" (to refer to an old Billy Joel song) come out, to give in to our other self, remove - although hopefully not completely - some of the restraints that keep our society safe and secure. It's kind of a reminder that we know we're not who we're meant to be, and we hope for that day when we find our purpose, our meaning, our true happiness. (However, it won't be the personas that too many take on for Halloween!)
Two, we recognize there is evil. Maybe we don't come right out and say it, but in all of our "dress up" as evil creatures, we're acknowledging that there is a dark side to our world, the possibility of a realm that "civilized" people say they don't believe in and certainly don't discuss in regular conversation. As a child, my family often hosted missionaries from around the world. I remember very specifically a missionary from Japan from back in the 1960s who talked about feeling the presence of demons and evil spirits. I have shared my own experience with participating in an exorcism (that wasn't really an exorcism but rather a guy suffering from delirium tremens). What that experience taught me was that somewhere, down deep, I do fear that spirits and demons are real, and I don't think I'm alone. We often hear of people talk about "powers of darkness" or being "consumed by evil." There is an entire industry of movies based on "horror" films about what happens in abandoned houses, empty cemeteries, lonely old hotels, and on dark and stormy nights. We can tell ourselves that we're too smart, too "enlightened" to believe in such stuff, but down deep, I think we all know that evil is real.
Three, evil is real, but Good overcomes Evil; love wins. We see it over and over throughout history. Oct. 30 is the anniversary of the last time the late Dr. Martin Luther King was arrested (it happened to be in Birmingham, Al., where I live), and for all of his flaws Dr. King demonstrated that peacefulness and kindness can indeed overcome hate and violence. You hear people say, "How can there be a God when there is so much evil in the world?" I say that evil merely proves that God exists, because evil is the perversion of good, which means good had to come first. All of our experiences with evil are nothing more than the perversion - the altering or spoiling - of something good. The world, I believe, was created without sin, which means without pain and deceit and betrayal. However, once evil entered the world (through disobedience and deceit and betrayal, leading to pain), rebellion against good came with it. And as much as we try to be "good,'' we have a hard time defining what "good" even means; of determining what "good" means in light of our own wants and desires; of controlling our own impulse for what makes me feel good even if it hurts you. We've lost sight of what "good" really is, which - I believe - is a proper understanding of God and who God is and what God wants for all of mankind.
Four, we don't understand hell. Ask someone "who rules in hell?" Chances are, you'll be told "Satan." I used to ask two questions when I taught kids' Bible classes. The first: Who rules in heaven? And they would kind of say, "God?" with a real questioning tone as if it was a trick question. Then I'd ask, "Who rules in hell?" And it was amazing- they'd almost shout out, "Satan!" or "The Devil!", confident in their answer. But of course, they were wrong. God rules in heaven, but God also rules in Hell. In fact, God created Hell as a place where Satan and his followers will be sent for eternal punishment. It's not some equal but opposite side of Heaven. John Milton, in Paradise Lost, wrote the line, "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven," and I've heard that quoted many times by many different people over the years. The problem is, you won't reign in hell. You can't reign in hell. Hell is a place of isolation and eternal torment, the ultimate punishment for the evil of rejecting God. However, the very fact that so many people believe the cartoons and movies and books that suggest Satan is sitting on a throne in hell, sending out demons and devils to do his bidding, only tell us how completely we've lost the truth of what hell really is. But Paul writes in Colossians that God "has delivered us from the domain of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of His Son." (1:13) 1 John 3:8 says, "The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work."
All of this is why Halloween All Hallows Eve ("Halloween") is followed by All Hallows Day (or "All Saints Day.").
Ironically, Oct 31, 1517, on the day before "All Saints Day,'' the 33-year-old Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. It's the date we credit with the start of the Reformation (although, to be truthful, the reformation of the Church was already going on in many places around Europe; it's just that Luther's resulted in the trial and conflict with the Roman Catholic Church, getting all the headlines).
In fact, the other name for Oct. 31 is "Reformation Day." Unfortunately, it hasn't caught on with retailers and partiers around the world.
Here is why I don't have a problem with Halloween, however. One of the slogans of the Protestant Reformation was Post tenebras lux: "After darkness, light."
Remember that in the morning after Halloween. The Gospel assures us that darkness has been defeated, that the "light of the world" has defeated darkness, and we're just waiting on that day when evil will, once and for all, be defeated.
Happy Halloween?
Not yet.
But soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment