KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 31 October
The Blessings of Tribulations
I always approach the week of Halloween and its festivities at the School with a certain trepidation and uncertainty. I am never quite sure culturally speaking exactly what we are celebrating, never quite sure what it means to want to be frightened or to frighten others by way of costume or haunted houses. What does trick or treat really teach? How to be jihadis or beggars? Just not sure what to make of it. Yet I get the idea of play and especially the play of our imaginations with respect to identity.
Beyond that there is something quite wonderful and profound in the meaning of All Hallows’ religiously and philosophically considered especially in the doom and gloom of our culture and, indeed, in the grey darkness of nature’s year. In a world which confronts us with so many awful and frightening events, such as the horrific shooting at the Synagogue in Pittsburg, it is wonderful to have before us the vision of heaven from The Revelation of St. John the Divine and the Beatitudes, the Blessednesses, from Matthew’s Gospel. These are like light in the midst of an worrying darkness.
Is what I see in Chapel each morning something ‘heavenly’? On Tuesday, many students and faculty were in costume: Asians as blonde Goths, Canadians as Ninja warriors, others as dragons and bunnies, eleven apostles (!), and even a Calvin and Hobbes! I always feel obliged to comment on the ambiguity of masks. They both conceal and reveal. Your costumes may say more about your personality than perhaps you realize! Something which Shakespeare knew only too well. There is something equivocal about masks. On the one hand, “there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face;” outward appearances can’t simply and completely reveal our inward thoughts. On the other hand, as Lady Macbeth says to Macbeth,“your face, my thane, is as a book wherein men may read strange matters.” Sometimes we reveal ourselves in more ways than we realize even when we think we are concealing ourselves and our thoughts. Macbeth crowns his fatal decision with the words, “false face must hide what the false heart doth know,” recognizing that we can “make our faces vizards to our hearts, disguising what they are.” For all of the fun of dressing up in costume these are important things to consider.
