TO TINSEL OR NOT TO TINSEL, THAT IS THE QUESTION

I am all for Halloween parties, parades, getting dressed up, and going Trick or Treating.  I don’t believe in ghosts (at least the popular notion of what a ghost is) but I do believe in ghost stories.  If you looked up over the front door of the rectory on All Hallow’s Eve Night, you would have seen my (hastily) carved pumpkin glowing.

The key is, however, that these are not odd ways of behaving floating out there on their own.  They are an extension of what happens at the celebration of the Mass first.  That is what (and always has) gives meaning all of these otherwise odd behaviors we exhibit at this time of year.  The Christian community comes together to celebrate all of the saints (especially those not officially recognized) and in our joy we burst forth from the church doors to continue the celebration in our homes with candy and music and costumes.

If it were not for a grounding in faith, this season would be a sign of a slight madness that overtakes our nation.  Why go about disguised as someone (or something) else on this particular day?  If we are going to unmoor it from its religious roots, why not change it so that it is always on a Friday and make it a three day weekend?  Or better yet, move it to early October when the weather is better.  Why not make every Friday a costume day?  Why give random strangers candy only once a year?  Why take a gourd and carve a face on it?  Why not just buy a ceramic one that you can re-use every year and be done with it?  Or if it is so cool, just leave it up year round.  Without faith, scratch too deeply and all of these celebrations become inane.  Fun perhaps - but inane.  

Thanksgiving is coming up.  Without God, what exactly are we giving thanks for?  “Thank you turkey for being food and letting us eat you.”  As if the Turkey had any say.  “Thank you Mom for making this fantastic meal!”  But she makes dinner every day and why make her do it on a day when we are thanking her for making food?  “Thank you for being my friends/family” might cut it but why do it especially on this day?  Do it another day when things are not so pressing.  “Thank you cosmos for being as you are instead of another way.”  Maybe.  But if existence is pure happenstance, it means there is nothing to thank or to be thanked that matters.  

But if there is a Creator who provides and we know things do not have to be as they are, we give thanks because we are debtors.  It reminds us of The Other.  We are paupers who need to remember we are all in this boat together so don’t let your pride get too high.  And these are things to celebrate.

If there is no God (at least a Pagan god), to Hades with all of the tinsel, the Rabbit, and the shoes placed outside the door.  It is absolutely silly.  Let’s just do our own thing when it is convenient for us, with music we actually like to hear ,when we like to hear it.  I’ll shop for you when there is a sale and let’s worry about things that really matter like Flag Day.  

MONDAY DIARY: ALMOST EXCRUCIATINGLY TRUE STORIES: KNOCK IT OFF

Every year: All Hallow’s Eve

I buy my favorite treats

for on this night I still believe

that one day someone will come knocking at my door.

Gazing out upon the night

from my window high

wondering - wondering if I might

spy someone knocking on my door.

With locked doors and darkened lights

I do my best to add

to the spookiness and the frights

of someone wanting to knock on my door.

For five years and then five more

I wait for “Trick or Treat!”

But what am I doing this for?

for no one comes to knock on my door.

Then late at night: our beggars dodged

we come to life and merry

eat our way through our bags of stodge

for we have avoided someone knocking on the door! 

SO AM I CRAZY?

I am an absolute party pooper this year.  

I would not have liked me last year.

It started when I went on a walk.  (I am on retreat this week and enjoy taking walks around the area.)  Everybody is decorated for Halloween.  Some of the decoration are just fun and silly.  Many are quite gruesome.  Scary monsters and tormented souls are everywhere.  It’s the pained ghouls in chains that make me sad.  SAD.  I think about it being a representation of a soul that is so mired in it’s sin that it is just plain “lost.”  And not lost as in it doesn’t know it is New York, but lost as in here is a soul not getting into heaven.  

I know.  Crazy.  Right?

So where are the saints?  Where is the faith as proudly shown off to the public?  To balance those who have no embarrassment establishing a tacky plastic graveyard in their front yard, why doesn’t someone have saints on their roofs showing them victoriously entering into heaven?  Maybe the could have a good fire going in the fireplace to provide smoke so that it looks like they are entering into the heavens.

Ghouls, perhaps, are politically correct.  Saints are not.

Also, ghosts and giant spiders do not require anything of us (except perhaps a scream.)  Saints mean something.  They stand for something.  And in their visage we see a challenge back to us that reminds us that there is a real choice join them on the roof or to join the skeletal arm reaching out of the ground beneath a styrofoam headstone in the front yard.  THAT is SCARY.

FRIDAY FAIR - HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

I won't be writing to you again until after All Hallows Eve so here is your Halloween post! Have a great weekend. Here is Sebastian's Halloween picture?

It wouldn't be Halloween without Making Fiends. Here is a Halloween Making Fiends game. And here is the Halloween special!




More Halloween videos:





Just a silly Halloween game.

From the USCCB website.

October 31 is Halloween. According to Sister Maureen Shaughnessy, Assistant Secretary for Catechesis and Leadership Formation for the U.S. Bishops' Department of Education, "Halloween gives us the opportunity to help people of all ages reconnect with the Christian understanding of this very popular holiday. Originally this day was celebrated by the Celts in England and Ireland as the end of their year. On that day they remembered all those who had died during the past year."

A number of customs that evolved related to this had to do with ghosts and scary things. As Christians we celebrate this day as the eve of All Saints, and in fact, many parishes and Catholic schools use this opportunity to have young people connect to the lives of saints - their own name saints or patronal saints connected to their parishes or ethnic backgrounds. It provides a time for storytelling, dressing up and celebrating.

More Halloween stuff over at Catholic Mom.

SPECIAL FRIDAY NIGHT EDITION!

HAPPY ALL HALLOW'S EVE!

Here is the Halloween special of Making Fiends!

And here is the Halloween Making Fiends Game!

Enjoy!

OF DEVILS AND BARNEYS

Perhaps because every job I’ve ever had either required the wearing of a costume or uniform, getting dressed up for Halloween has never seemed very intriguing. Actually it was a good day not to get dressed up. It is not always that fun.

One time Monsignor Novicky at St. Greg’s asked me to help out at the parish carnival (I was a lowly seminarian) and I naively said, “Sure, whatever you want.”

“Oh really,” he said.

Mistake.

Unfortunately it was during the time when Barney the giant purple dinosaur was outlandishly, almost demonically popular. He walked me into a room where a bunch of padding, furry purple clothes, and an empty dinosaur head were sitting on a table. “Why don’t you put that on, walk around the grounds a little and give the kids a thrill.”

I hated Barney. But such is life.

I struggled into the costume that was obviously made for a smaller person and a teenager was assigned to guide me around since I could barely see and had almost already killed myself on a set of stairs. We stepped outside, (this is not an exaggeration) and I swear I took no more than two steps when kids from every single point on the compass turned like a pride of hungry lions picking up on the sent of raw meat and let out a collective roar of, “IT’S BARNEY,” abandoned their parents and came tearing across the grounds towards me. It was one of the scariest moments of my life.

Such is the power of getting dressed up. We get to be something we are not and afforded the chance to see a little bit what it might be like. (I now know I never want to be Barney.) Hence one may not simply get dressed up, but one must be dressed up as something they are not in every day life. For example, I may not go to a costume party dressed as a priest. But my best non-priest friend may. Although I suppose I could go as a Zombie priest.

Don’t you think the last thing Dracula or the Wolfman wants to be on Halloween is Dracula and the Wolfman? I bet even Superman and Wonderwoman want to be somebody else just one day. They probably put on T-shirts, jeans, and boat shoes and hang as just plain people.

There are some things that are still taboo. Prince William learned this not to long ago when he went to a costume party dressed as a Nazi. There are still lines that cannot be crossed easily. It put a certain fright into people who wondered, “Is this revealing something about the man inside the costume?”

Typically within an hour costumes and personas begin to be dropped for comfort and company sake. (It’s hard to eat a slice of pizza with a trident in your hand or to have the entire extent of your conversation with someone be about how you want to bite their neck.) Even Superman starts feeling naked without his cape.

I still am uncomfortable saying that it is Okay to pretend to be something that Jesus spent so much of His time exorcizing while He hung out with us, but I am much more concerned with the type of saint a person is attempting to be the rest of the 364 days and 20 hours of the year. The work is not in rehabilitating Halloween, but reinvigorating the life of the Church. Demons, ghouls, and bandits (and is it just me or are there less and less of these?) are a symptom not the problem. Observe tonight. Enjoy. Plan for tomorrow.

A GHOST OF A CHANCE

A number of years ago I worked as a carpenter in a theater. As all theaters are rumored this one sported tales of its very own ghost who banged around in the catwalks at night scaring the night security guards. We were running way behind schedule and I found myself working late into the night, falling asleep in the theater several nights in a row. Sure enough I heard the banging. It was loud enough to wake me out of a very sound sleep. Was it a ghost?

Saint Thomas Aquinas tells us that at death the soul is separated from the body like a ball full of air that has been pushed underwater and then let go. Immediately the soul either soars to heaven or plunges into hell. So does that discount the possibility of ghosts according to Church teaching?

Not exactly. Most people, I think, would be shocked at how much the Church has not made a definitive statement on and ghosts are one of those things. There are allowances for the possibility of them. Some of those possibilities involve purgatory. Some souls are going to heaven but have not yet been completely cleansed of their earthly attachments and so must go through a purgation as nothing unclean will enter before the presence of God. We only have a sketchy and somewhat symbolic idea of what purgatory is. Is there a possibility that a soul might have some dealings with earthly things as part of its purgation? Maybe.

There may also be the case too that God might allow us to see either in dream or vision a person deceased in order to remind us to pray for them or to call us to holiness. Samuel prophesied from the grave and we readily accept for the possibility of saint speaking to us such as at Fatima.

Of course we also know that angels as a cosmic force act in the world. We have only to look at the Annunciation for that. But if good angels can act, so can evil ones. We see this in the demons that Christ regularly banished from people.

I am highly skeptical about such activity but still find it something not to mess around with. Every diocese has an exorcist and they aint around for kicks (though they are very seldom called upon). But the other world is like electricity. Properly experienced there is absolutely nothing dangerous or wrong with it. Improperly used it can kill you.

Are we forbidden contact with the next world? No! We do it all the time. But we do it as God bids us. It is called prayer and intercession. Even legitimate scientific study is not completely outlawed “provided there is no recourse to means that are essentially immoral or specifically forbidden.”

But trying to control cosmic forces, using spirits to gain knowledge from God’s realm, (a form of divination) evocation of the dead, these are all forbidden actions. Such actions lead to superstition, possibilities of being frauded, and the very real chance that one is dealing with a decepting spirit.

If you feel you are being visited by a “ghost”, I would probably think there was more likely a more earthly explanation. But if not, if it is of God there is nothing to fear. Pray. If it is not of God, you have nothing to fear for you always have God. Pray.

Though I tend not to believe in such things, tired of being kept up late at night in that theater I climbed up into the catwalks and said a prayer for the soul of our “ghost”. The banging stopped. From then on. That means I either prayed a cure for the hot water pipes, or perhaps a soul went to his reward. Who knows?

NICE, NEAT, CLEAN, RESPECTABLE CHRISTIANITY

I don’t know why people think they have to look to the Devil and the dark side to come up with scary All-Hallows-Eve costumes. Scripture and tradition have their own stable of people and beasts that if you saw them in a dark alley you would probably shock your shorts.

Fortunately those who celebrate this day in a Christian manner only pick nice, respectable saints, not some of those reprobate saints that go around carrying their own heads, or skin, or other body parts. I mean that is just so not done in polite society. And those instruments of their martyrdom with which they are all parading around in heavenly pageantry. Most of them would not be allowed in Church in the state of Ohio for carrying knives, swords, arrows, grills, pinchers, and wheels with spikes on them. Real saints carry flowers or palm branches. That’s what I want to see if I’m dying and going to heaven. Not a bunch of rascals with instruments of torture. One could get the wrong idea of where one has ended up.

Then there are those animals of Scripture. Some are Okay like the animals on the ark, or sheep, or the ox and ass, well, except for that one that talks. Whoever heard of a talking ass? (Don’t go there.) But then you have serpents, seven headed dragons, sea monsters and griffins and the like. I ask you, what business do they have being a part of Sacred Scripture? Sacred Scripture is supposed to be nice, sweet, warm and fuzzy.

Oh! OH! Then there are all those creatures from our symbolic vocabulary! The pelican that pierces its own breast to feed its young with its own blood symbolizing Jesus’ death on the cross! The phoenix that was said to inhabit the Arabian wilderness and lived to be three to four hundred years old and who, from time to time, would dive into a funeral pyre whereupon it would rise from its own ashes restored to its youth calling to mind the resurrection. And that rascally centaur who symbolizes our savage passions and excess but who also, in the life of Saint Anthony Abbot pointed out the way to reach St. Paul the Hermit in the desert. That’s just to mention a few.

Respectability. That’s what we want. Nice, neat, clean Christianity. Robes and palm branches. Very English. Maybe someone playing a harp. Safe. Polite saints not so much begging but asking nicely for candy – perhaps to give to the poor. Now that’s an All-Hallows-Eve for you.