Day: November 2, 2017

What are these?

Halloween. Sigh. Or is it ‘hooray’? How do we think about Halloween and the customs and activities that surround it in contemporary culture? Can we even think about it? The gentle reminder to students at Yale to be mindful about their costumes while acknowledging the inherently transgressive nature of mask and costumes at Halloween created a student uproar in which staff actually lost their jobs for not insisting on proscriptions about things which might be deemed offensive.

Halloween in the secular and popular culture is equally about something quite ancient. It is the idea of boundaries. The transgressive feature of Halloween is all about crossing over or fudging boundaries, not the least of which are things about death and evil, about gender and culture. The important point, perhaps, is to recognize that there are boundaries. In Chapel on Halloween, I looked out upon a rather strange collection of costumed students – a pirate, a pink unicorn from the Ukraine, pussycats from Deutschland and Asia, what I thought was a marshmallow from Beijing which turned out to be sushi (my bad!), two Franciscan monks, various princesses, a bottle of spicy mustard, a ninja warrior, various versions of zombies and different animals, several boys wearing school girl uniforms, two playing cards, and the Headmaster as a Sasquatch or so I thought, wrong again – it was really an Ewok! And so on and so on.

It seems to me worth thinking about these things. Masks, after all, both reveal and conceal and how are we to know? Taking a risk, I asked the Senior Chapel what would it mean for someone to dress up as Hitler, as Stalin, as Mao? Would that mean an endorsement of those figures and their programmes (and pogroms!) or would it be a satirical take on the monstrosity of their evil and depravity? They are certainly among the monsters of evil in the twentieth century. There is an inherent ambiguity that belongs to masks and costumes especially at Halloween.

But perhaps the best way if not the proper way to think about Halloween is to recall what it means spiritually and intellectually. I have in mind not just the ancient Celtic festivities of Samhain and other things, which reflect on the post-harvest death of the year and, by extension, death and the after-life, but its explicitly Christian meaning. Halloween is All Hallows’ Eve. The eve of All the Saints, the hallowed ones. The word is familiar from the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father who are in Heaven, Hallowed by thy name.” Hallowed means the holy. In the lesson from Revelation read in Chapel, we are reminded of a multitude which no one can number of all peoples and nations. They are “those who have made their robes white in the blood of the lamb,” a reference to Christ in the Christian understanding. We are being reminded actually of the human vocation to holiness – to a sense of the perfection and truth of our humanity which is found in the spiritual community of All Saints. That calling is a calling to be better people, a calling which cannot be achieved simply on our own strength, hence the reference to the Lamb.

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