Spooky Season
I don’t know about you, but for me and my house, this is Spooky Season. As soon as September rolls around, my husband and I start our plans for how to celebrate; from the decor to a list of all our favorite horror movies. Even as I write this, I have Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor playing in the background because there’s also a list for music. For me, marking this time of year in these ways goes back to my childhood, when Halloween was as big a family celebration as Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving.
The lead-up to Halloween included these same traditions I now keep as an adult. Even then, my cousins and I would gather around the TV to watch horror movies that, admittedly, my mother probably would have preferred I didn’t see as the youngest of the bunch. My mother was of a milder temperament than my two aunts, but she still indulged me with my aunts’ stories and books, as well as this movie time with my cousins. These traditions also included scream parks, themed foods and drinks, and trick-or-treating for hours on end.
Different people may celebrate this time of year differently than what I grew up with. Some prefer to bypass it altogether, or they might celebrate it in a milder fashion and by another name. While I respect that people, in many cases, have really good explanations for not celebrating the same way that I do, there are still plenty of reasons behind keeping this time of year with the macabre, the dark, and perhaps even the potentially horrifying. It may even be to our advantage. I’d even go so far as to say that doing so can be incredibly Christian.
The Symbols We Carry
To start, if you’re not terribly familiar with the original Brothers Grimm tales, these children’s stories do not shy away from macabre themes. Their Disneyfication is much closer to the popular imagination of what constitutes a good children’s story, and, of course, that is what we have come to expect. This has become so much of the norm that now saturates popular media. However, various studies show that there are real benefits to the original stories, with their heavy life lessons and subject matter far beyond the G rating of modern retellings.
These rather grim Grimm tales, and others like them, serve an important developmental role in presenting the more gruesome realities of the human experience in a safe and controlled way. They allow the developing mind to face these realities and process them without the pressures of direct experience, and so they better prepare children for when they inevitably have to deal with them in the future. In the same way, the pop-culture elements of Halloween that center images and representations of the nightmarish can serve the same function. Far from glorifying the grotesque, it instead becomes an act of bravery by facing head-on symbols of the more dreadful possibilities within the world. From there, it has the potential to move into being an act of defiance. It’s a refusal to be overcome.
To recognize that Evil has been overcome in Christ, to defiantly stand in front of it and claim it as powerless, is an incredibly Christian act. The Christian life itself is even centered around one such symbol of Death’s powerlessness and Christ’s victory over it. The Cross adorns our homes, churches, and other spaces. It’s even carried on our bodies as jewelry and tattoos. This ancient instrument of genuine horror is no less a symbol of death because it is also a symbol of Christ’s resurrection. It is both death and resurrection, the one always preceding the other, which stands at the center of our faith.
In his letter to the Galatians, we hear St. Paul say, “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world” (Galatians 6:14). We who bear the name of Christ, and who glory in his Cross, are not primed to be a squeamish people.
We are instead primed by God to be courageous and to stand our ground in the face of Evil (Ephesians 6:13). We are empowered by the Spirit to proclaim boldly the ancient refrain: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Corinthians 15:55). This is the same Spirit given to us to overcome our fear of anything that may be staring down at us (2 Timothy 1:7), because “if God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31). We do so in the confidence that not even “tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword… neither even death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:35b, 38–39).
It is the nature of the Christian to be able to stand in the middle of Death and Sin in all of their guises, in all of their costumes, and not be afraid or intimidated. It is our nature to defy the claim that they have any strength or power because we know that Christ has already been victorious over them. These Powers, for what power they may still have, are now so diminished that the words of the psalmist have proven quite prophetic: “He whose throne is in heaven is laughing; the Lord has them in derision” (Psalm 2:4).
Laughing in the Face of Death and Sin
Halloween and the time leading up to it can be an opportunity to embrace all of these truths our faith holds. It allows us a time to practice our God-given courage and provides a safe environment where we can laugh at the diminutive and playful representations of all of the things that God in Christ has overcome. Doing so might even help us to better face the manifestations of real Evil when it tries to tighten its grip on the world again. We can practice now how to stand in the middle of the horrific, so that we can stand even taller when we face it truly. We can firmly instill in our minds that there is now nothing to be truly afraid of. Not even things like the Cross which has now become our glory.
However you may keep this season, I hope you will take the time to remember these truths. I hope that you will take the time to laugh in the face of the things which try to intimidate and scare us because we know, even if they do not, that they have been robbed of any true power over us. Whatever signs of Death and Sin may yet try to rear their heads from time to time, and wherever it is that they may appear, it is they who are already overcome. So, as for me and my house, we will have no fear, and we will celebrate because of it.
This article was submitted by the Rev. Benjamin George-Thoms, Rector at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Springfield.
