To mask or not to mask?
To mask or not to mask? That is the question. I have to confess that I approach Halloween with a certain degree of trepidation, with a sense of uncertainty and unease about what we are doing and what it means. Ambiguity lies at the heart of the secular forms of Halloween albeit in different ways than what belongs to the festival, historically and spiritually speaking. The common ground to some extent is the blurring of boundaries which may (I stress the conditional) help us to think more fully about what it means to be human. The boundaries between human and nature, between human and animal, between human and machine, between male and female, between the living and the dead, between the grotesque and the cute, between the safe and the threatening in the frisson of the scary, are all deliberately blurred. Some people apparently like being frightened. All these things point to something more than our quotidian experiences.
Halloween, literally speaking, means All Hallows’ Eve, the eve of the medieval Christian Feast of All Saints. All Hallows means All Saints, all the hallowed ones. The Lord’s prayer helps to make the point. “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,” we say at every chapel service. “Hallowed be thy name” means “holy be your name,” the idea of the holy which we explored last week in terms of the idea of holy spaces, places set aside for what has meaning. Halloween, religiously speaking, refers to the idea of the Holy and of our calling to be holy. It speaks in other words to the end or purpose of our humanity, something wonderfully captured in the Communion of Saints, the company of the holy ones who embody the hopes and dreams and aspirations of our humanity in its truth, a truth found in God.
The masks of this week are ambiguous. The mask or costume you wear either reveals or conceals some aspect of your personality. Take heed! This inherent ambiguity is the best part of the idea of a masquerade. What does this representation really mean? If someone dresses up as Winnie-the-Pooh is that a Christopher Robin fantasy, a comfortable childhood memory, or a mocking of Xi Jinping? Because of the latter references to the Winnie-the-Pooh are banned in China. But who knows? Who can say? The lines of meaning are blurred. There is a necessary gap between the appearance and the reality.
The secular forms of Halloween are a long remove from the Christian festival of All Saints. It offers a vision of our redeemed humanity, a community which finds its truth and unity in God. Human uniqueness and diversity finds its truth and ground in God. There is more to Halloween than just the ‘fun’ of costumes and the ‘fear’ of horror and shock; bad taste and bad judgement notwithstanding. Yet both sacred and secular challenge us to think more deeply about our humanity. Perhaps the take-away point for the ‘selfie-culture’ is that you are more than your image, more than the mask you wear, more than the face you put on to meet a thousand faces. That something more is signalled in the Communion of Saints, a vision of our humanity in its truth and dignity. To reclaim this might be saving grace.
On Thursday and Friday of last week and Monday and Tuesday of this week we have continued with Exodus as an ethical and an educational treatise. We read the beginning and the end of the story of the plagues which result in the going forth or exodus of the people of the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery and oppression. The ten plagues are a contest between Pharaoh as a kind of God and God himself through his agents, Moses and Aaron. While the Egyptian “wise men, magicians and sorcerers” have a certain technological power over nature, testament to the great river civilisations which harnessed nature to human ends, the point of the story is about an ethical principle upon which nature itself depends and which cannot be reduced to a natural force or to the human manipulation of nature. It is about how the Hebrews come to learn about the truth and power of God as “I Am Who I Am,” the principle of the being and the knowing of all things. The contest is a collision of principles in and through which the Hebrews are liberated not by any techne or skill of their own but by God and to God. The parade of plagues are about a distinction that God makes between the Hebrews and the Egyptians.
The story culminates in the passover, the defining event for Judaism and which shapes and informs the central act of Christian worship, the Mass or the Eucharist, as well as contributing in some ways to Eid al-Adha in Islam. The idea of the sacrificial lamb looks back to the intended sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham or, in the Qur’anic retelling, of Ishmael by Ibrahim. “What mean ye by this service?” This question belongs to the Jewish Passover and extends to the Christian Paschal mystery, the exodus of Christ in his passion, death, resurrection and ascension. A lamb is sacrificed and its blood brushed on the lintel and doorposts of the Hebrew people in Egypt as a sign of identity. The last plague is the death of the first-born in all of Egypt, of man and beast, but God passes over the homes of the Hebrews. This act of God liberates the Hebrews. Pharaoh relents and lets them go. The remembrance of that deliverance by God defines Israel.
Modernity confronts the other side of our manipulation and power over nature in the realization of how destructive and deadly technocratic culture really is. As the Canadian poet and philosopher, Jan Zwicky notes, technocratic culture denies any meaning to reality and so to us as humans. The past week at the School focused on environmental and climate awareness. But that will be meaningless and not a little hypocritical if we fail to note two things: first, the complexity of the climate issue; and second, our complete and utter complicity in it. One need look no further than our dependency upon our digital devices. There is nothing green about the digital culture; the incredible use of data largely through social media platforms consumes an increasingly obscene amount of energy.
We cannot point the finger at others if we are not prepared to look at ourselves. We are probably not going to stop driving cars or stop flying across the world in planes or stop using our devices but we can, at the very least, be more aware about our use of these things. The simple point is an ethical one about what defines us. We don’t have to be defined by our digital devices. The great prayer of confession in the Anglican offices of Morning and Evening Prayer wonderfully has us confess “the devices and desires of our hearts.” Our “devices” are really about our hearts.
This awakens us to the questions about the Good which should lead to thinking and acting differently and more thoughtfully. More thinking of a contemplative nature and less doing belongs to a return to the ethical.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy