Scary Things

I'm writing this the week before All Hallows Eve.  In any household where children reside, I know the excitement is building.  I understand that, aside from the gift receiving extravaganza of Christmas, Halloween probably ranks highest on the elementary school list of favorite holidays.  It's surprising that it's such a favorite since kids don't even get a day off from school.  I don't doubt that the massive collections of usually taboo candies that result from the after-dark extortion ritual of "trick or treat" have something to do with the day's great appeal.  But I think there is much more to it.

I was occasioned to start thinking about Halloween because on driving into Portland this week I passed a house garishly decked out in cobwebs, jack-o-lanterns, inflatable ghosts, big plastic spiders, and gravestones in the lawn attended by a greenish colored stuffed zombie.  It is the kind of over the top decorating that we used to see only at Christmas.  On discussing this with a few adults later that evening (people at least a decade beyond "trick or treat" age).  I realized that the excitement of the holiday is not confined to childhood.  People were talking with great excitement about costumes and what dastardly scary tricks they might play on any poor misguided children who might venture to their front doors on Halloween.  On hearing tales of how they had terrorized children in the past told with such glee it was clear that Halloween continues to have magic for even the oldest of children.

The night is about spooks and ghosts and goblins and witches and the chance to dress up and be someone from your fantasies.  There is a temporary suspension of the usual rules of real life.  The night seems full of mysteries.  We behave as if ghosts were real and witchcraft was able to do magical things.  We can walk the streets and encounter other mysterious creatures at whose real identity we can only guess.  No one is what they seem.  Surprises and secrets may be behind every bush (in fact we hope they are).  The night seems alive.  And, of course, one of the mysteries is yourself if you are hiding behind a mask.

I often feel like we need the opportunity (especially we adults) to suspend our usual sense of reality from time to time.  The world can often lose some of its excitement and mystery in the minds of sober, rational, practical people like ourselves.  Something in us longs for a world where anything can happen; where things are not so predictable; where there are hosts of things unseen; and everything is not what it seems.  That sort of a world is frightening, but that is also part of its fascination.  Of course, the real world may actually be more like that than we usually think, but we have worked so hard to tame it.  We are conditioned to see only what we expect to see.  We have rational or scientific explanations for everything that happens.  We have domesticated our environment so that it is maximally useful and minimally scary.  Unfortunately, that also makes it poorer and a little more boring.  I'm not going to suggest that we return to a belief in magic and demons, but perhaps we can find ways to marvel more at what we don't know (which is so many, many things) rather than reducing our reality to what we do know.

One of the reasons why children on Halloween night can deal with their fears and even enjoy them a little bit, is that most of them wear masks.  A mask can be a very freeing thing.  It's not just something that hides your identity.  You can be more fearless because in some way you are not really you.  You can behave in ways that you might never dare otherwise because the mask takes on a life of its own and draws you out of your own restrictions and fears and inhibitions.  You can "try on" another you.

We adults seem to get locked into the identity that we have so carefully chosen or constructed over the years.  We burden ourselves with the need to be consistent.  We can only be who and how we think we are, as if that were only one thing, or as if we really knew what that was.  And so we lock up many of the surprising and unpredictable elements of ourselves.  Wearing a mask allows a little bit of the complexity that still lies behind the masks of our everyday selves to leak out.

Maybe we all need a little dose of Halloween in our lives on a more regular basis, some sense of unreality; some room for the mysterious in us and around us to break through.  For the fact is that God is most alive in all of those unpredictable, surprising elements in the world and in ourselves that we usually try to shut out or explain away.  Finding God and rediscovering our own souls may well depend upon experiencing mysteries rather than explaining them.

So take a walk this Halloween night (or any night for that matter).  Let yourself see a world alive with things unseen where everything and everyone are not just what they appear to be.  Let yourself feel the presence of all of those deeper realities that we usually choose not to acknowledge.  God is there.