Today is Halloween. It is also Reformation Day. Not that the two have anything to do with one another other than an accident of history. Anyway, I wanted to take just a few moments to talk about a phenomenon I had not really encountered until I was an adult. I find it difficult to understand, really. I am going to try to state my position as clearly as possible without, at the same time, dismissing out of hand the thoughts and beliefs of others.
There are those who take Halloween so seriously, they not only do not "celebrate" it, they actively seek to ensure that others do not do so, either. Because of its traditional association with monsters and ghosties and all sorts of beasties, there is a sense that even a comical flirtation with things of questionable moral value can only lead others down a path to perdition.
I want to state, categorically, that evil exists. Denying that reality is foolish. We see it around us. Earthquakes and cholera in Haiti. Earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes in Indonesia. Gay teens bullied to the point of suicide. Children beaten, starved, tortured, and murdered by their parents. The twin ancient enemies - indifferent nature and human beings - exist all around us.
Accepting this reality, however, does not entail, by some kind of necessity, accepting all sorts of other things that are termed evil. Devils and demons, evil spirits and Satanic cults - these are, by and large figments of the human imagination (except, it seems, in Norway, where they take their Satanism so seriously it became a bit of a problem; an exception that, I think, proves the general rule). For those Christians, exercised by a sense of urgency over the threat posed by evil, accept the fundamental reality of these and many other creatures and their human worshipers insist that Halloween is a day to celebrate evil miss a fundamental reality made by J. K Rowling in the third book of the Harry Potter series. One particular creature, the boggart, is most susceptible to laughter. Amorphous and formless, it manifests as whatever the person confronting it fears most. It is defeated not so much by courage, but by humorous dismissal.
By making sport of those elemental creatures that haunt our nightmares, by laughing at death and evil allegedly incarnate, we Americans manage to show the best way to confront the monsters within us all - by showing that, in the end, they cannot have power over us. Even as we confront the constant barrage of evil acts, large and small, at least on this day, we insist that evil cannot win, because it is something we need not fear.
Those who insist, out of an earnest desire to refrain from participation in anything that might be considered evil or morally vicious, forget that rather than shrinking from confrontation with our darkest fears, we must learn to face them with courage and, in the end, a bit of wry wit. Even childish nonsense is a good cure for the creepies.
So, our children will go forth this night, gather up candy in a social ritual that is generations old, and laugh out loud at the outlandish notion that there is anything to fear. This is not to say there is are not real things out there from which we need to protect our children, our families, our communities, our nations. Rather, it is to insist that we cannot live in fear of the boogeyman, because the boogeyman isn't real. Even as we insist on the reality of some being known as Lucifer and his potential for havoc, we might just miss the far more real, far more preventable evil that exists down the block, the next town over, or on the other side of the world.
Mexican drug gangs that decapitate people; the Burmese and Chinese governments; a young man who murdered then burned the body of an 18 year old college freshman in DeKalb, IL - these are the real monsters that haunt our world. Facing them takes real skill, real courage, and, yes, a bit of humor. Laughter is the greatest weapon we human beings have in facing evil. Halloween, as currently celebrated, is a marvelous lesson in managing fear and evil.
