A lot of folks don’t know about All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, which are sacred occasions for remembering great ones and dear ones who have died.
But everybody knows about All Saints’ Eve, which we call Halloween, and celebrate with costume parties and trick-or-treating. There’s a lot of humor and silliness at Halloween, a lot of activities that are perfect for little kids, but there’s also a lot of superstition, brutal imagery and violent storytelling.
I wonder a lot about the relationship between our Christian customs of sacred remembrance, and our popular revelry in terror and violence.
It’s interesting how these things go together on the calendar every year, right?
There’s a whole history of how the holy days came to be, which people should learn about, but just now I’m thinking about the simplistic arrangement of these impulses in our culture.
People mourn. People are scared. We’ve put these things together. People need to grieve, people want to be frightened.
I’m no expert in horror movies, but The Babadook, A Quiet Place, The Sixth Sense and It all come to mind as films with main characters who are remembering and grieving precious ones whom they have lost. Scary stories often begin by establishing who is missing from the story - one who should be there, but isn’t.
The man we meet at the beginning of the movie, the one with the shattered heart, doesn’t feel like a hero when he looks in the mirror. The woman who grieves has no notion that she’s a protagonist on her way to some great triumph over evil. She only feels destroyed, long before the chaos that viewers have signed up to watch is unleashed.
Sometimes the heroine who faces the monster is standing up to fight and defeat the very thing that took away her loved one. But sometimes there’s no vengeance, there’s no vindication.
It’s just a fight to survive, to remain, and maybe to heal, in the aftermath of great loss.
A lot of our pop culture is offered as an escape from the truth of our lives. It helps us pretend that reality isn’t real, and avoid dealing with facts we’d rather ignore.
But costumes and fiction and conjured emotion can also be ways to get closer, to go deeper into the most painful truth. The fact that we are mortal, the anguish over death, and the dread that evil inspires. Surreal and outlandish stories can help people grapple with what is most genuine and inescapable, and even invite us to imagine ourselves not being defeated by the worst things that happen.
After all, on Halloween, we don’t tell stories of a monster who wreaks havoc, or a killer who terrorizes until everyone is slain, the end. There’s always someone, or a community, who rises to confront the horror.
The heroine doesn’t always defeat the monster forever. But she claims her own humanity and dignity and strength, and she clings to what she loves. The hero doesn’t always survive. But he does stand, and he does face his fear, with all the power that belongs to him.
God bless you, dear ones!
Pastor Rob Leveridge
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