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I remember a Halloween night in my early teens, when my friends and I were too old to Trick-or-Treat anymore, but too young, yet, to give up on the festivities altogether, so we rented a movie-marathon's worth of B-grade horror flicks instead. I've never done scary movies that well, but that night was especially terrifying. After all my friends had gone home, I lay awake in bed, lights on and saucer-plates for eyes, while visions of zombie limbs danced through my head.
Which was kind of the point in the first place, of course. Fear is one of the central themes of Halloween; and whatever else is happening when hordes of ghoul-begarbed kids tramp around the block demanding treats at the threat of tricks-- whatever else that's all about-- it is an expression of our complicated relationship with that oldest of all human emotions: fear.
Freud might argue that this harmless-seeming tradition is really a sublimation of our deepest cultural fears. We are haunted by the suspicion that unseen "somethings" lurk beneath the surface--that something dreadful would happen to us if ever they did surface--that there really is more going on in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy. This suspicion is very old and very dark, and still very real, even in our clean, well lit, modernized world. In fact, the cleanliness and good-lighting of the modern world actually exacerbates our fear, because we no longer have the old channels--myth and ritual and unexplored regions on the map--that we once used to hang it on. And because powerful emotions, bottled up, will find expression somehow, we still observe one day a year where these fears can be put on display. It's all in playful good fun, of course; but then, what is play, if not a distorting, funhouse mirror, held up to those things we take most seriously?
Might all this play at being scared on Halloween Night actually be a venue--one of the few venues left to us, in fact--for acting out the spiritual Fear that still haunts us?
My hunch is that it is; and this is why, as a Christian, Halloween fascinates me.
Because I think the hauntedness of the human condition is actually an important theme of the Christian Faith, too. As a Christian, I believe that what people are most afraid of, whether they know it or not, is God. He is the "unseen something"-- mysterious and terrifying--lurking beneath the surface with the threat of dreadful things if ever he were to come into full view.
The fancy word for this is "The Numinous," which is a theological way of talking about the fear evoked by the divine presence: the dread of the holy--the awful thought of the infinite--the crushing weight of glory. As Aldus Huxley puts it, "The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to the in-compatibility between man's egotism and the divine purity, between man's self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God."
This is where C. S. Lewis starts, incidentally, in his classic case for the existence of God in The Problem of Pain: not with reasoned philosophical syllogisms or scientific evidence that demands a verdict, but with the Numinous--the haunting fear that humans have always had, that there is something terrifyingly other, present and holy and at work in our day-to-day.
It's where God starts, too, incidentally.
Re-read how God makes his covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15 if you want to get a biblical glimpse of the Numinous. If you recall, Abraham butchers a heifer, a ram, a goat and two birds. He arranges them into two piles opposite each other, and keeps this surreal vigil, scattering the vultures whenever they get to close to the carcases. Then, the Bible says, "As the sun was setting a thick and dreadful darkness overcame him." And there, on the edge of dream at the threshold of reality, a numinous vision engulfs him: a smoking "something-or-other" passes between the bloody pieces of the sacrifice, and from the depths of that thick darkness, the dreadful voice of God himself speaks, binding himself on oath to Abraham, swearing to be his God forever.
Not for nothing did Jacob call God "The Fear of Isaac" (Gen 31:42). It's enough to keep a young man awake at night with lights on and saucers for eyes.
But this brings me back to Halloween and my hunch that it's a modern-day sublimation of our age-old fear of the Numinous. Because the conclusion of Abraham's story is Christ; and in Christ we find that our fear of the Numinous has been both affirmed and transformed. After all: when the Fear of the Lord turns us to the Cross of Christ, we discover there that atonement and purity and eternity now defines our life with God--that perfect love has indeed driven out fear--that anyone who fears the Lord in this way, has nothing, now, to fear.
That's good news.
And it may be that on Halloween, when the neighbourhood is collectively sublimating its Fear of the Numinous with candy apples and monster-masks--it may be the most wondrful time of the year to remind ourselves of this good news.
The Halloween Files, Part III: Horror Movie Marathons and other Numinous Reflections
David and Little John and the Language of Love
A while ago a friend sent me a link to this article at Touchstone Magazine about the language of love and the death of male friendship in our culture. I find some of the rhetoric a bit unpalatable, especially towards the end, but the overall thrust of his argument scored a touche for me: our radically sexualized culture has undermined healthy, authentic, and necessary expressions of affection between men, and this has distorted the male experience of friendship.You can give that a read, too, if you like (click here). I remember weeping real tears over this scene as a boy-- it was the first book I'd ever cried over-- and re-reading it and re-reading it and crying every time. There was just something so moving in Little John's artless expression of love for his friend on his deathbed. I didn't know the words pathos or catharsis then, but I'd use them now.
But the point of the Touchstone article, and I think it's a valid one, is that expressions of love like this are old, natural and (above all) platonic; and one of the unfortunate consequences of the modern sexual revolution is that we are losing (or have lost) the non-sexual categories we once had for experiencing and describing them. If he lived in our world, where love is assumed to include a sexual dimension unless the term is otherwise clarified, Little John would be hard pressed to cradle his dying friend in his loving arms, without raising some questioning eyebrows (or knowing smiles) about his sexual identity. And a ten-year-old boy would likewise be hard-pressed to shed real tears over the scene.
Some interpreters read this line as evidence that the friendship it so poignantly describes was sexual in nature, and that there were homoerotic undertones in Jonathan's covenant with David back in 1 Samuel 20.
Admittedly, this passage raises far more issues than we have space to wrestle with here (Wikipedia summarizes the debate), but let me at least suggest this: we may lose more than just some old-fashioned sexual mores, if a biblical man can't tell another man he loves him without brigning his sexual identity into question. A biblical imagination when it comes to the language of love--and with it the potential for men to express affection and closeness in ways that are affirming of gender and distinctly nonsexual--may actually be on the line here, if David and Jonathan's embrace must be sexual, simply because it was an embrace.The Halloween Files (Part II): The Modern Living Room and the Age-Old Denial of Death
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Time was the modern-day "living room" was called the "parlour." The word derives from the French word parler (to speak) and pointed to the fact that once upon a time this room was reserved for entertaining on only the most formal of occasions. Here we kept the most valuable of our furnishings and the most ornate of our domestic status symbols, in a kind of sacred space within the home that was set aside for momentous events and special visitations.
Like births, and wedding receptions, and funerals.
Yes, funerals. The word "parlour," and the memory that once we hosted funerals in the living-room, actually lives on in our modern euphemism for the local mortuary. These days funerals happen in "funeral parlors," but time was the funeral--at least the open casket and the viewing and the reception parts of the funeral--time was this happened in our own parlors.
The “funeral home” used to be our own home.
Because once upon a time dealing with death was an integral part of life, and by necessity we made space for it in our day-to-day. Like Psychologist Richard Beck puts it, "We used to live with the dead. We were born in our homes and we died in our homes. The wake was in the home, and our dead bodies were viewed in the parlor of the home."
Of course, we don't call the parlour a parlour anymore, anymore than we use it for wakes and funerals. Today professionals deal with death for us, in professionalized space out of sight and out of mind, and, what with all that valuable real-estate taking up space in the home, we've reclaimed the room that once served this purpose. Today it's called "the living room" (perhaps aptly), and the memory that it was once used for dying, too, is all but gone.
This isn't the only way we deny death in our world.
We used to worship alongside the dead, for instance. The churchyard was a cemetery, and once a week you had to walk by that sombre memento mori on your way to meet with the Lord of Life. Time was.
Richard Beck points out how now a-days, cemeteries are kept on the metropolitan outskirts, not at the centre of public life, and since no one wants to drive past a field full of morbid-looking tombstones, we've replaced all those solemn monuments with ground-level grave-markers so the fact that it is a cemetery can be kept strictly on a need-to-know basis. A modern cemetery looks more like a serene city park than real graveyard.
I think there is something almost pathological in our modern world’s efforts to push death to the edges of our awareness and to professionalize and de-sacralise our encounters with it. In general, I would argue that making peace with the reality of death is a vital step towards spiritual maturity, and that the denial of death leads to spiritual emptiness. This is part of what Thoreau was getting at, I think, when he said that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Quiet desperation hums almost audibly in the heart that refuses even to look at death.
But there’s more: because as a follower of the Risen Jesus, I believe both that death has been drained of its despair, but also that the inevitable fact of death can, and should, and does point us to our Maker and the offer of life he makes us in Jesus Christ (so death, defeated, is made to pay tribute to its Conqueror, Jesus Christ). But in a world that refuses even to look at death, the news of its defeat will fall on deaf ears.
Which brings me at last to the point of today’s post. Because in 22 days our culture will celebrate a community-wide ceremony that asks us all to take a good hard look at death, if only for one night of the year. Or at least it used to ask us to. It came knocking on your door asking for a treat, of all things. And even today, the vestiges of that ceremony—plastic tombstones and rubber skeletons and all—are still hung up on display, a Made in China memento mori, but a memento mori nonetheless.
And it seems to me, thinking about Halloween theologically this month, and all, that there’s something going on here that the Gospel can, and should lay hold of. Because the truth is, in Jesus Christ we need neither deny death nor to despair in it. And as the quiet desperation of a death-denying culture is given voice, (mask-muffled voice, to be sure, but voice nonetheless) on this one "All’s Hallowed" night of the year—whatever else is going on October 31—we're being given the opportunity to remember and proclaim the sure saying that we live by: “Death has been swallowed up in Victory.”
Thanks be to God, who gives us victory through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Saturday Morning Sermon (VI)
Here's another excerpt from our series last month on Spiritual Gifts. Our text was 1 Corinthians 12:1-11. You can listen to the whole sermon here.
Maybe it’s because one of my passions happens to be music that I always think of concert band when I read this stuff in 1 Corinthians 12.
When I was a teacher I played saxophone with our High School band for a semester (we’re keeping with the back to school theme here). And one of the things I liked about concert band is: when you got your part for a new song, you had no idea what the song was gonna sound like. Tenor Sax seldom got the melody, you see, so when you played it, it just sounded like random notes all over the place. Incidentally, that may be why when Dani was in concert band, her sister made her practice out in the garage. Because by itself, the clarinet part was just a bunch of squeaky high notes that barely sounded like music.
See: it was only when you played your part with the flute and the tuba and the trumpet and percussion and trombone—you know, all the different instruments together?—only then did it sound like a real song.
And the sax part, of course, sounded nothing at all like the flute part. But then again, the song would be pretty dull if all 70 parts were the same flute part. And the instruments are all pitched differently, too, so the different parts were all written in different keys. Which meant that the parts for a Bb trumpet and the Eb Alto Sax and an F French Horn looked nothing at all like each other. You couldn’t play the flute part even if you wanted to; but when you all played together, it turned out you were playing the exact same song.
And... do you see where I’m going with this? Paul says there’s different gifts, but one Spirit who gives them.
And he’s trying to set us free to play our part with all we got, even if it’s not the flute or the tuba—even if we’re not playing a melody part, or it looks like we’re in a different key, or we can’t quite hear how it fits into the whole song—to play it with all our heart and soul and mind and strength because—because that’s the part the divine composer gave us to play—and we can trust that it fits with all the other parts to make a single, harmonious song of worship for him.
The Colors of Martyrdom
There's an old sermon from 7th Century Ireland called the Cambrai Homily. It lays out an elaborate theology of Christian Martyrdom using Matthew 16:24 as a starting point ("Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me'). The Cambrai Homily famously categorizes martyrdom according to three colours: red, white and green (though the actual hue of the third color is disputed; in Irish it's glas).
"Red martyrs" are perhaps the most obvious. They faced violent persecution, torture or death for the sake of Christ. Red martyrs bled for Jesus.
Such martyrdoms, of course, were both common and precious in the earliest days of the church (witness the horrors described so vividly in the Book of Revelation), but as Christianity became increasingly mainstream in the Roman Empire, bona fide martyrdoms got less and less easy to obtain. On at least one occasion, a group of Christians actually turned themselves in to the Roman authorities, asking to be executed for Christ's sake (and creating no small amount of bewilderment for the Roman governor, who, if not sympathetic towards Christians, was at least indifferent, and certainly not hostile).
So the church needed new ways for the faithful to express their death-defying commitment to Christ. This they found in the concept of a "white martyrdom." A white martyr did not shed literal blood for Jesus, but expressed his or her witness through some life-long vow of asceticism or other--a bloodless "death to the world" that might include things like: vows of chastity, monastic oaths, mendicancy, or becoming a hermit. These are "white deaths" in lieu of the red.
Now this was old news by the 7th Century, but what the Cambrai Homily adds is the third color: a "green" (glas) martyrdom. Green Martyrdom was about self-mortification and denying desire. Fasting was a predominant form of "green martyrdom." So were penitential acts like praying in the frigid Atlantic or spending the night immersed in water (this seems to be a common one). A Green Martyr died to the immediate needs of the flesh, in order to turn the heart to God instead.
I've been thinking about the Cambrai's color scheme for martyrdom ever since I preached this sermon on the Martyrdom of Stephen, back in August. You see: I live in a world where desire is often seen as the driving mechanism of life: consumer desire drives our economy, emotional desire drives our entertainment industry, and, according one author at least, sexual desire drives the Internet (see Patchen Barss's book, The Erotic Engine).
The point is: in a world where life is so closely associated with fulfilled desire, self-denial really does have the odor of death about it. So I'm wondering today how radical a witness for Jesus we might have if we updated the tradition of the Green Martyr.
What if we consciously saw denying those desires that no one in our culture thinks you can live without, as a stand-in for the honor of dying for Christ?
Paroxysms of Peace
The English word “paroxysm” is an oldie but a goodie. Literally it describes a sudden and/or violent outburst of emotion. You could have a “paroxysm of laughter,” though the term generally has negative connotations. Paroxysms of rage are more common.
The word itself comes from an old Greek word, paroxusmous, which, according to my Greek lexicon, means “stirring up, provoking”. It only appears twice in the New Testament.
The first appearance is in Acts 15:39. Here Paul and Barnabas have what the NIV calls a “sharp disagreement” and the KJV a “contention”. Literally, Luke says they had a paroxusmos so intense that they parted company. The fight, it turns out, was over John Mark (of the Gospel of Mark fame), who had deserted them on their first missionary trip over in Pamphylia. Paul felt he was unreliable and didn’t want to bring him on their next foray. Barnabas begged to differ—begged so sharply that a paroxysm of conflict flared up—begged so sharply that he and Paul parted ways, Barnabas to Cyprus with Mark in tow and Paul off to Cilicia.
It’s a sad story, to be sure, but then, those of us who have been doing ministry for a while now know that churches have split over smaller issues than the roster of the mission committee. And bigger.
But here’s the fascinating thing. Besides its use to describe the “sharp disagreement” in Act 15:39, the word paroxusmos only shows up another time in the New Testament. In Hebrews 10:24 the writer says, “Let us consider how we can spur one another on to love and good deeds.” This is how the NIV renders the verse. NASB says “to stimulate one another to love and good deeds.” Old KJV says, “Let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works.”
Literally what it says is something like: “Let us consider one another towards paroxusmon-- incitements, provocations—of love and good deeds.”
Now, former Bible teachers of mine read this blog from time to time, so I need to be careful here not to commit the exegetical fallacy of semantic anachronism, but I find it worth reflection, at least, that the Bible uses the word paroxusmos once to describe a sharp disagreement between two Christian ministers, and elsewhere to describe (in what most biblical scholars would agree is an startling image) our duty to “provoke” one another to Christian love. On the one hand, a paroxusmos led to a deep rift between two friends; on the other hand it leads to Christian charity and shalom.
And I’m reflecting on this especially, because like I say, conflict in ministry is inevitable. Paroxysms of all sort are bound to come. And because we tend to prefer smooth feathers and shiny faces on Sunday morning, I think received wisdom is that they ought to be avoided, or at the very least resolved discretely, even if, in their avoidance or resolution, we find ourselves settling for false peace. At least the tomb looks white, right?
But Hebrews 10:24 and Acts 15:39 fly like two sticks between the spokes of Received Wisdom’s bicycle, sending False Peace head over handlebars. Because when you line these two verses up, they suggest that conflict is not by nature bad; nor is it to be avoided at all cost; and there are fates worse than ruffled feathers.
These two verses suggest that conflict can actually become a catalyst towards charity and service, if it’s entered into for Christ’s sake; and what determines whether or not it will is whether or not the parties involved are really provoking one another for Christ’s sake. (Even Paul and Barnabas’s paroxysm led to love and service in the end. In the short term, it expanded the ministry of the gospel by sending Barnabas to Cyprus and Paul to Cilicia; and in the long term, we have hints that things get patched up between Paul, Mark and Barnabas (see Col 4:10)).
This is hard work. Paroxysms of any sort (ancient or modern) hurt. But then the cross itself teaches us that the Way of Christ has never avoided the suffering that redemption costs. And conflicts that redeem will cost us: utter humility and risky openness, and above all real, raw honesty about our own goals and agendas in any given dispute. But if well seek those treasures of his Kingdom, first, then we may find that redemptive Paroxysms of Peace are being added to us, as well.
The Halloween Files (Part I)
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Yesterday I saw the first Halloween decorations on display in our neighborhood. The door of a house around the corner was sporting a ghostly rubber skeleton in a tattered white robe, the lawn of another house down the street was cluttered with a variety of kitschy plastic tombstones, and from the porch across the way, a ghastly deaths-head glowered down on passers by with flickering red eyes .
‘Tis the season.
Personally, I’m ambivalent about Halloween. On the one hand, I see problems with its historical ties to paganism and the occult, its celebration of violence and its glorification of gore. On the other hand, there are things in the Halloween tradition that inspire me to think about my faith more deeply: the questions it asks about “Hallowed-ness” (the sacred and the nebulous), its tenuous connection to All-Saint’s Day, the way it taunts a death-denying culture, for just one night, with the knowledge that we are, after all, mortal.
My wife is less ambivalent. Because of all the problems listed on the one hand, she’s always held Halloween at arm’s length. We had some friends who had immigrated to Canada from South Africa and they were absolutely mortified the first time they encountered a real Canadian Halloween. This community wide celebration of witchcraft and death was baffling and disturbing to them. My wife has tended to share their opinion.
For my part, like I say, I’m not sure; but one of the things I am sure of, is that there’s always more going on in the most commonplace trappings of our culture than meets the eye; and it seems to me that if there ever was a cultural trapping that could challenge us to think about the intersections between secular culture and Christian spirituality, it’s the strange stuff that takes place on the night of All’s-Hallowed-Eve.
All this is my way of introducing a series I’m working on for October here at terra incongita. Through the month of October we’re going to be spending some time exorcising my Halloween demons (so to speak) and analysing the theological significance of this most-secular-seeming tradition of Canadian culture.
I hope you’ll join us for the trip. And as we’re packing our bags, let me suggest a few more reasons why Halloween is worth some careful Christian scrutiny.
1) It provides a good primer on the Christian Worldview. Buzz-Light-Year costumes and pillowcases full of candy not withstanding, Halloween actually asks some pretty significant questions about the veil between the material and the spiritual, and whether or not its as solid as we usually like to think. Historical Christianity has always held that the veil between the material and the spiritual is made more of gossamer than pall, and that things like angels and demons and miracles and the "supernatural" are closer and real-er to us than we know (and not something you'd ever want to triffle with). Reflecting on Halloween, then, helps us ask some important questions about how Christian our Worldview really is.
2) Halloween is one of the last community traditions we have. When else does your neighborhood throw a huge block party and hand out goodies to all the kids? In this it can’t be avoided. It’s like voting: even opting out is significant form of participation, and the way Christians participate inevitably says something about our posture towards the community in general.
3) Theological reflection on Halloween is good practice for theological reflection on culture in general. The Christian faith actually takes the themes of Halloween more seriously than the even monster-garbed kids counting their candy afterward do, so no matter how we participate in it, we need to do things like: read culture through theological lenses, and weigh cultural practices against our Christian convictions, and make faith-shaped decisions about our role (as salt and light) in culture as a whole. This is stuff, actually, that Christians ought to be doing on a regular basis about more regular things than Halloween night (retirement investing, drinking coffee, driving cars, recycling, sexual ethics, the list is endless). Halloween, it turns out, is a good, low-stakes training ground, to develop these skills.
Musical Mondays (V)
I heard an old proverb once that says, "Uninitiated boys will burn down the village to feel the heat." This is a song about what it means to become and to be a Christian man.
Burning Down the Village
Hey Bro I can see you way back there when we were kids
before we knew we’d be men
And though I needed to tell you I needed you
My words escaped me again
like lost dogs or broken castles
Stolen songs I don’t need any more
If I had known that iron was so fragile
I would have told you before:
You’re a king, you’re a lover you’re magic you’re a warrior
The heart can only grow wise when it breaks
You’re a child you’re a brother
in his shadow you’ll discover
When you least expect you’ve got what it takes
And Bro I can see you you’re right there in front of me
While we make up our names
I know I’ll never be the man I want you to see
But I got lost in the game
Like unsung songs or unspoken secrets
Hollow masks I don’t need any more
If I had known that iron was so fragile
I would have told you before
You’re a king, you’re a lover you’re magic you’re a warrior
The heart can only grow wise when it breaks
You’re a child you’re a brother
in his shadow you’ll discover
When you least expect you’ve got what it takes
And son, I can see you way up there ahead of me,
not many years from now
'Cause once you start on the road to the high country
I know you’ll find it somehow
like innocence, you find it by losing it
Prairie skies like distant shores
If I had known that iron was so fragile
I would have told you before
You’re a king, you’re a lover you’re magic you’re a warrior
The heart can only grow wise when it breaks
You’re a child you’re a brother
in his shadow you’ll discover
When you least expect you’ve got what it takes
You’re a priest you’re a poet a prophet and you know it
the cure is throbbing there beneath the ache
You’re a child you’re a brother
in his shadow you’ll discover
When you least expect you’ve got what it takes