A Case for Halloween

We may be coming up on Thanksgiving, but I've got Halloween on my mind. As a teacher, Halloween, like Christmas, is a holiday where I must tread with care. There are usually a few students whose parents have a real discomfort over Halloween, just as there are those who have issues with Christmas, generally due to religious reasons. I respect religious differences and therefore I try to walk a careful line around such holidays.

But this year, I found myself thinking about this reality, about why so many Christians take issue with Halloween. Actually, it's not just Christians. Many adults seem squeamish at the whole fascination with the evil and violent images that Halloween conjures.

Understandable feelings. Reveling in the dark side of existence can be bad for the soul. So, there may be a line that shouldn't be crossed. However, I would submit that acknowledging the darkness, and the power behind fear and violence and death, does not deny God or life. Even for those who believe in a life after death, death is a reality. The suffering, loss and grief of death are still real aspects of human life. Even Christ experienced them. True faith should not only be able to acknowledge death, and darkness and evil and fear, it should be able to incorporate them into a fuller, more complex understanding of existence.  Perhaps by facing the creatures born in the darkest corners of our imaginations, and embodying those fears, we actually strengthen our souls' ability to endure and survive the frightening and dark parts of human existence.

At least, those are my thoughts on this cold and dark November evening.

When Violence Hits Home for Us

It's been another week of violence and destruction.  Some friends recently reminded me that in many parts of the world, this is the norm.  Bombs and destruction and a permanent sense of danger.  In fact, some people are annoyed or angry that we in the United States make so much out of these events when they happen to us, while we ignore them in other parts of the world.

This attitude bothers me.  It's true that such terrible things happen with horrific frequency in many places.  But, that doesn't mean we shouldn't react with shock when it happens in the United States.  And carrying the shock and anger and despair of violence with us all the time is no way to function in our lives.  What's wrong here is not that we react when such violence happens in the United States. What's wrong is that the sense of safety we carry with us is so comparatively rare in the world.  What's wrong is that violence is the norm anywhere.

If we don't react with shock when it happens here, we are saying it's normal, or it should be normal.  Normalizing violence is no way to fight violence.  Denying people the right to feel shock and sadness and despair in the face of violence and destruction is no way to preserve our sense of humanity and compassion in the world.  Human beings have the capacity to be horrible, and they have the capacity to be magnificent.  When we feel shock and sadness and horror, and even anger, at violence, we are living up to our best selves.  When we ignore violence, sensationalize it, turn it into entertainment, glamorize it, indulge in it, we are living up to our worst selves.  The fact of violence in one place does not make violence acceptable in other places.  The fact that the level of destruction in one instance of violence is so much greater than in another instance does not make the lesser destruction any more acceptable.

It is human nature to feel most acutely that which touches us most closely.  When our own parent dies, we feel it in a way that we never will when our friend's parent dies.  That doesn't make us selfish.  It's honest.  So, yes, when a bomb explodes in Boston, I feel it more acutely than when a bomb explodes in a place I've never visited.  That doesn't mean I don't care about what happens in other places.

Are Monsters Real?

When we're kids, monsters seem so very real.  They hide under the bed, in the closet, around dark corners and behind furniture.  They terrify us, and they fascinate us.  We want protection from them, and we want to be them.  Dinosaurs and alligators and aliens, vampires and ghosts and werewolves populate our minds and our books and our toy boxes and our collections of Halloween costumes.  We love their power, their capacity to wreak havoc and unbridled destruction.  They are big, strong, wild, untamed, powerful, in control.

Adults love to tell kids "there's no such thing" as monsters and ghosts and vampires.  But adults are wrong.  What are dinosaurs and sharks and alligators if not monsters?  Of course, the really terrifying monsters are the ones we adults don't want to name or think about in relation to our kids, though we seem to love writing about them.  They are the monsters masquerading as humans who do terrible things to other humans.  They are all too real.  And far too many kids have met those monsters face to face.

Judging by the characters that populate our movies, our books and our TV shows, these more insidious monsters fascinate our adult selves as much as dinosaurs did our kid selves. This fascination seems a lot more disturbing if you ask me.  The monsters that fascinate us as kids aren't necessarily malevolent.  They're just big and destructive.  It's in their nature.  They're predators doing what predators do.  Even the vampires and werewolves and ghosts have only a sort of abstract evil to us as children.  They're interesting mostly because they're gross or mysterious.

Our adult fascination with real, malevolent human characters, with the dark and depraved side of human nature, lands quite decidedly in the moral gray zone.  It's disturbing.  We often couch it in the safety of police procedurals, stories where the bad guy gets caught.  Yet, these stories seem to dwell on and wallow in the malevolent acts with a voyeurism that raises concern.  Are we, as adults, still longing for the license offered by imagining ourselves as the monster?  What moral and ethical price of the soul are we willing to pay to indulge our imaginations in this way?

There is another category of monster, one which is perhaps better referred to as "demon."  It is the unseen, internal one, the hardwiring of our brains that seems outside our control and torments us in a thousand different ways.  Depression is one such demon.  Addiction is another.  Psychosis, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder.  We have these new names for them, but back in humanity's childhood we called them "demons.'  If you've ever had one of these things inside you, the characterization feels apt.  It seems beyond your control.  You can't see it or touch it but it has so much power over you, and yet it feels like an alien force, an alien force that has somehow gotten its tentacles into your brain.

When I watch some of my students who struggle with issues such as autism or ADHD or anger issues or emotional disturbance, I see them wrestling these internal monsters. They feel overwhelmed, like they're fighting a battle they can't possibly win.  They need a the power of a T-Rex to fight that stuff.  Hell, adults need the power of a T-Rex to fight that stuff, and even then it's not enough.  Kids need T-Rex on steroids, and he needs to be fighting in their court.

So, are monsters real?  You know it.  Don't let anybody ever tell you any different.