By the end of this month the clocks in the UK will have fallen back, and the days will be shorter. Children will walk home from school in the dark, crunching dead leaves underfoot and trees will stand stripped back to trunk and branches. Darkness and death become more apparent in nature and when the light is not strong enough, the darkness starts to take shape.
On the 31st, monsters come out in the form of stories, movies and costumes, principalities manifesting through secondary causes. Children will come knocking on our doors, dressed as vampires, zombies, ghosts and ghouls. They will ask for a treat and threaten a trick for those who refuse to participate. It’s not easy to know how to handle this dark carnival of death, but one thing is clear: as a soc-iety we haven’t handled it well.
All Hallows’ Eve is the vigil of All Saints’ Day, when Catholics remember the Church Triumphant. It is not, and should not be understood to be, a standalone festival. The saints are the answer to the question posed by the margins that emerge from the shadows at Hallowe’en. But what if the answer never came? It would look something like the permanent carnival we see all around us all of the time. The monstrosity of butchered children and sexual depravity, of broken families and disordered addictions; without the answer it’s Hallowe’enland.
Many parents will find it hard to strike the right balance when it comes to Hallowe’en. There are some who will want to protect their children from any associations whatsoever. Turn the lights out and hide when the mons-ters come. Others might relish the chance to let the demons out just a little too much.
The notion of trick or treat forces us to examine how we deal with the problem of the things that lurk in the shadows of our hearts and the shadows of our souls, when they come to our door. It is tempting to close our eyes, pretend that the monsters do not exist and hide behind the sofa, but there is a danger in this self-reliant response, because the mons-ters are there and they cannot be ignored. We are told that if we do not placate the demons with a treat, they will play their trick, and so they will. We can run, but, without Christ who has already paid the price, there is nowhere to hide.
In Luke 11:23-27 Jesus says: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean … then it takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. The final condition of that person is worse than before.”
Catholics don’t just know the answer, they participate in it. They do not stare longingly at architectural drawings, they live in the house. As nature plays its trick and threatens to take away the sun, they do not have to fear, they know that spring will come again. That despite the appearances of the dark days and barren trees, new life will emerge. Death lost its power a long time ago. The only power it has now is the one we give to it ourselves. If we scrupulously sweep the house relying only our own good works, we are in danger of welcoming a horror worse than that which we try to eradicate. If we open the door and give the monster a home, we no longer recognise it as a monster at all, and like the bloodsucking vampire, we become it.
Flannery O’Connor doesn’t hide behind the sofa, neither does she welcome the monster in. Instead, she recognises that it is the armour of Christ which will protect the temple and defend us against the monsters for ever, keeping the gargoyles on the outside where they belong. In her murderous tale “A good man is hard to find” she writes: “‘She would have been a good woman,’ the Misfit said, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’”
Hallowe’en can act as the gun to our faces; it’s a useful reminder of the danger that lurks. But unless we want to get shot, it’s to the sacraments we must go for protection. “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” As we prepare for All Saints Day, then, we can pray that we, armoured up and ready for battle, may one day count ourselves among them.
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