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.
We have already seen in Chapel that our humanity when left to its own devices is deadly and destructive, hence the need for a covenant and, ultimately, the need for grace, for what comes from God to us in which we find the true worth and dignity of our humanity. All Saints’ is not about others simply; it is also about us and about our relationship with one another and with God. And all in a community. There is something quite wonderful and beautiful about All Saints. In the face of a disordered world of suffering and death, of despair and evil, we are reminded of an heavenly community of which we, too, are a part. How? Through worship, the worship of God, the one who is worthy of our attention and devotion. His grace seeks our good, a good which is found in community and therefore shapes our thoughts and actions now in community.
The lessons on Thursday and Friday expanded on the theme of the vocation of our humanity to holiness, to a kind of wholeness and completeness through The Beatitudes from Matthew’s Gospel. They are the charter of our humanity in the quest for perfection and holiness. They are the blessednesses that belong to our life in the spirit. They turn the world on its head and open us out to the qualities of soul that truly belong to human perfection in community. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” the humble; “blessed are those who mourn;” “blessed are the meek,” the gentle ones; “blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness;” “blessed are the merciful”; “blessed are the pure in heart;” “blessed are the peacemakers;” and “blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness sake.” And with each beatitude comes a result: “the kingdom of heaven” for the humble and the persecuted; “comfort” for mourners; “the earth” for the gentle, in contrast to the bullies of our world and day; “satisfaction” for those who seek justice meaning that they shall find true justice in the communion of saints, in the city of God; “mercy” for the merciful; ‘the vision of God’ for the pure in heart; the identity of being “the children of God” for the peacemakers. In a way, The Beatitudes are all about aspects of the kingdom of heaven which frames all of The Beatitudes. They are about the good which by God’s grace can be found in everything.
Such ideas confront and counter the vanity of our illusions and the deceit of our own desires. They challenge us by opening us out to a larger vision and view of our humanity. Though turning our disordered world on its head, they are about the spiritual qualities that belong to human worth and dignity, the truer boundaries that define us and contribute to the idea of being better people. Perhaps it is possible to think about Halloween.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy