This week we head into All Hollow’s Eve (Halloween) followed the next day by the more sober, sanitized, and Christianized holiday known as All Saints Day.
Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The ritual of Samhain clearly marked the beginning of winter. If the ritual tells us anything it is that to make it through the winter – you need protection from outer darkness which can encroach in the form of spirits or the cold and the elements and you need protection from the inner darkness of fear and isolation that could also kill you.
Samhain was a “costume party” marking the beginning of the dark, cold winter, which, without central heat, antibiotics, and other modern miracles, was deadly. These ancient people believed that on All Hallow’s Eve the boundary between the world of the living and the realm of the dead became blurred. Ghosts returned to earth on this one night each year, some of them lovely, and some terrible.
People gathered at the field on the edge of town just as the sun set. They lit a bonfire. They wore costumes made of skins and wore animal heads: Horned hats, ugly masks, or even grandmother’s old black shawl. During the celebration, commoners and royalty were all reduced to anonymity. Since you can’t tell who is good and who isn’t, you have to befriend them all and ask them for protection for the long winter ahead. When the celebration was over, in the wee hours of the early morning when the fire was only coals, they gathered those embers into buckets and took them home to light their hearth-fires for the winter ahead.
This October ritual has stood the test of time. When the Romans conquered the lands of Ireland, England and France the ritual was slightly modified but retained it’s emphasis on the winter solstice and the honoring of ancestors. In the seventh century Christians claimed and reshaped the holiday into All Saints Day, a day to honor saints and martyrs. (Pope Boniface IV) The name “all Hallowmas” from which the world Halloween was derived means all saints day. It’s a bit confusing, which is why Christians are yet divided about whether or not it’s appropriate to celebrate Halloween.
Christians, by dividing the holiday up, left the “heathens” the ritual of Halloween night and created a subsequent day of saints. But, as our gospel lesson for the day reminds us, you can’t easily distinguish between evil people and good ones. Because they all (we all) wear masks. The line between good spirits and evil spirits is always blurry. Some very great saints have also proven to be very great unbelievers as the new biography of Mother Teresa suggests. She had many a long lonely and doubt-filled night while she served the poor in Jesus’ name.
And this is the beauty of the festivals we celebrate this week-- it’s all mixed up. In the Islamic tradition there is a belief that “gins” are humans who are also spirits. They can be good or evil. And they can change without a moment’s notice. Discernment is everything. People of faith across many religious traditions know that good and evil are two sides of the same coin.
So we take our kids down to the costume store and let them have a heyday of foolishness. Want to be someone good? Or someone really disgusting? Want to be Ugly Betty, who is beautiful on the inside? We’re not all that different underneath the masks.
Adults also have fun playing around with costumes (if we let ourselves go a little bit). I recently heard a radio ad from a local costume shop and learned a few things about the latest trends. The ad was about a pirate outfit “arrrrhhh” and a Frankenstein mask “ohhhh,” and a pimp costume. Now the pimp voice was clearly African American and he said he was wearing “bling” and “looking for his ho,” on Halloween this year.
I called them up. We need to address negative racial stereotypes whenever we encounter them. “Well,” the manager said, “pimp costumes are very popular again this year—mostly white guys wear them.” I explained my feeling that selling a costume that makes fun of a whole race of people and jokes about using women as sex slaves is degrading and ….I think I lost him at that point. He said, “Well, if we responded to everyone’s complaints we’d have to become a Bible book store!” Now there’s an idea! Hey, let’s swap one negative stereotype for another. Well anyway, the point is that dress up is far from innocent play. As Bill Moyers would say we are all living out of our collective symbols of right and wrong. And Carl Jung points out that we all wear masks, most of the time, because we are fearful of our own shadows.
And here comes the scripture text for the week, which is a wonderful look at the way we mask ourselves with judgment and self-righteousness. We have a story of two men in a sacred place, praying. The first one you notice in the story is wearing his finest wool suit with silk grey threads, and an impeccable midnight blue tie. Maybe he’d come early to church that day because he was the greeter, or an usher, or had to open the building because the pastor had moved on a bit too quickly and he had to fill in a few duties. Or maybe he was always dressed like that for church because his beloved departed grandmother (charter member of this church) would have expected it of him, or frowned down from heaven if he showed up in something more casual. After all he was a man of distinction in his community, and at work. Though he sometimes envied the new dot.com kid who was now his boss, who came to work in the jeans he brought up to Ashland with him when he moved from Silicon Valley.
The man cut a nice figure, had a soft smile, very few worry lines around his eyes. He had obtained what they call a terminal degree from an east coast university. He knew his equations and languages; he had studied the Hebrew Bible, in Hebrew. But in the quiet of the sanctuary he thought it was just himself and God. He walked forward toward the cross and laid his hand on a pew and just looked up for a minute. And then he saw the other man shift in his seat in a pew across the aisle and three rows back.
This man was sitting forward, barely visible over the pew backs. His elbows were on his knees and he was sagging under the weight of some lost dream. His eyes were cast down and one hand covered his face, with the other he patted his chest like you would pat a baby who was on the verge of crying. The standing man noticed him there and quickly looked away, for while he didn’t remember his name, he thought the man was an old accountant with whom he’d made some business deal – maybe an “off the record” transaction he’d made for him—to keep his tax load more reasonable. It made him very uncomfortable.
And to keep from feeling his own shame, he turned his thoughts toward prayer. These words, according to Jesus, he prayed “thus with himself.” He’s not praying to God, mind you, he’s praying with himself. He’s pumping air into his deflated ego. “God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are—extortionists, unjust, adulterers, or even--that guy there…I fast twice a week, tithe my possessions…” Well la-tee-da.
This man wears the mask of privilege and his judgment keeps him from owning his own shadow. It keeps him separated from the soul inside of him, the part he left behind when he traded in his black dungarees and mud stained red-ball jets to please mom or dad or grandma. He lost himself way back when, as he squeezed into his little boy suit, went to cotillion club, went off to college. They all invested in him, by golly, what else could he do but succeed, and smile, and purchase a Mercedes and a bride and an overpriced house?
He really thought he was fine, mind you, but underneath that mask, was a kid who’d been unhappy for years, who gave up pole-vaulting and playing an instrument that he loved, or going to art school, or becoming a taxi cab driver just because… if he’d seen that his life was his own. All he could see now was that he came out better than that other guy.
And while he was thinking all of this, the man in the pew was praying simply for humble acknowledgement. He runs a money laundering business for the federal government for heavens sake, he’s sure he’s a sinner. But to my thinking, he’s also wearing a mask. An, “I’ll play small” disguise. Perhaps inside of this man there is a drive toward something nobler, something good. Perhaps there is a drive toward grandeur – a Nobel Prize he could have won, an invention he could have put his name on, a famous poem he could have written. But he played small instead. He lived down to his father’s expectations of him -- that he wouldn’t amount to anything. “No use sending him off to college,” his dad said, “that would be a waste of my hard earned money.”
So here’s these two guys in church with us today. Both of them wear a mask….one of greatness hiding his humility and the other in humility hiding his greatness. They are two but they are one person. If the pompous one acknowledged the scoundrel inside himself and the scoundrel claimed his worth the masks would fall away and they could see each other and thereby see the shining face of God.
So here’s the Halloween assignment. Pick your least favorite person in the whole world and dress up and act like him or her for a day. Would you learn something about yourself? Clearly what you despise in others is a dis-owned part of yourself. That’s why adults go nuts at Halloween too; we get to be the parts of ourselves that seem counter to our true nature. The pure rent slutty outfits, the gender rigid wear drag, and I’ll guess that there’s a run on George Bush outfits this year. The day is a status thing too. My mother made all of our costumes on her singer sewing machine –even the cow my sister got to be the front end of, while I walked the neighborhood looking at the ground. That must say something about me, doesn’t it?
My mother also looked with disdain at the Kreskee drug store outfits that we were not allowed to buy. We always had to be good things too – fairies or butterflies or princesses. I wanted to wear a red striped sock and pointy shoes and go out as the wicked witch of the west after the house fell on her. But, noooooo, I had to be Belinda, that sappy sweet “everything will be fine” good witch. And we were gender bound, no pirates, no G.I. Joe’s, no werewolf’s (the boys got all the fun stuff).
I wanted to spend the evening wearing something not usually me, or even “very unlike me,” but in fact Ben Laden is like me, and so is Dick Cheney and so is Darth Vader, and Yoda, and Sponge Bob Square pants—and that’s the point of the ritual and the gospel lesson ---that we are all one in this world and perhaps the next. Not all good and not all bad. We can’t divide up or the winter will overcome us.
We’re all scared when we can’t pay the heating bills, and it’s harder to live on the streets when it turns colder. We need each other. I’ll laugh at your outfit if you laugh at mine. If you jump out of a coffin, I’ll shriek and we can both raise our adrenaline.
Child psychologists say that children learn how to handle fear through the Halloween ritual of play. It looks scary – yikes, but oh, it’s just Tommy in a gorilla suit. We can relax now. It looks like a really bad witch, but it’s just Sue. Oh, Sue! Underneath these disguises we are all the same, pompous, vulnerable, egocentric, and defenseless. You don’t have to justify your existence. As Jesus said, “If you exalt yourself, you will be humbled.” “If you humble yourself, you’ll be exalted.” We are all terrible and terrific. We don’t need to be afraid of the winter within or the winter ahead. We are loved, so loved. And there’s nothing under the mask that we need to fear, it may likely be the image of God shining through on our own ordinary faces.