NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 30, 2011
Spookiness
Halloween is upon us again - the "Eve of All Hallows," or All Saints - celebrated today, at least in this realm, as one of several materialist spectacles from which all meaning has been evacuated. Except, a certain cuteness: Cute little kids in cute little costumes. If there is anything left to meditate upon, it would be the cuteness of cute things.Those with some sense of history are aware that this is a night when ghosts, ghouls, and goblins - or whatever dark spirits, beyond human apprehension - roam freely, to be banished in the dawn of sanctity. This re-imports a little poetic meaning, or the beginning of some meaning. All of our Catholic ancestors (which includes all Protestant ancestors, if you go back far enough) - or perhaps we might say, all human beings before the false dawn of technology - were aware of a certain spookiness in the shadows. Likewise, many who live today beyond the glare of city lights. We call them superstitious, from this distance; but we are ourselves, generally, too far displaced from them to make such judgments. Those who have lived in the quiet of remote places, away from the electric glare, might have more to observe. A room lit by oil lamp or candle is different in kind from a room lit by bulbs or fluorescent tubes. For one thing, it is larger. It includes dark as well as light, and many more grades of shadow. And the minds of people who live beyond our glare - beyond our cities, where the stars are deleted at night; where the world at large is the unlit back alley - are by force of nature differently disposed. On the high seas, where the stars lit the passage, and the winds were necessary to push the sails, and the presence or absence of the moon could be decisive, sailors appreciated the dark forces of nature. Compare, the floating hotel that is a modern cruise ship, where dinner is always served at a fixed hour, and only a catastrophe could delay it; where everything else seems under human control; where the foundering of the ship would be a scandal, and not the kind of misfortune to which human flesh is heir. By analogy, most of us today live aboard the cruise ship, with a few conceits carried forward from our sailboat past, which no one need take seriously. And we would all go down with it, together. But meanwhile we watch 20-foot waves from 40 feet of freeboard, and are not impressed. Death itself does not impress us, until we are at death's door. It is as if it only happens to other people. The question of what lies beyond that door remains a goad only for the imaginative, or the morbid, or the seriously ill. Yet the door is there as surely as the stars above, behind the wall of glare. Humans could never know what lay out there in the darkness, and we still cannot know. We accuse our ancestors of superstition, yet our own achievement has only been to conceal the dark. We are as superstitious as they were - human nature is human nature - but the grounds for superstition have been trivialized. Everyone has been taught that ghosts, ghouls, and goblins don't exist. That is the modern view - unprovable, for negatives can't be proven. The teaching is thus at best a white lie: Where the truth is, we have no idea. That such things must in themselves be quite inhuman, yet can be framed and drawn only by the human mind - this much I think we can know. We are safer to confine such spooks to the inhuman sphere. We can recognize superstition itself as an evil. But here I am reaching for an older, frankly religious teaching, that was in many ways more complete, and more rational, than our modern view. It was to allow the possible presence of angelic and demonic forces, beyond the human ken, and human influence. It was to counsel people not to play with dark and unknowable forces. They were taught to make their standard only the knowable good, and thus to act within the ambit of their knowledge. "By their fruits ye shall know them." There is extraordinary range in this ancient counsel. More deeply, our ancestors were taught to have faith in God, beyond all apparitions. Moreover, a God revealed in a love that is omnipotent; so that faith includes trust in the larger scheme of things. As Julian of Norwich expressed it: "All will be well and all manner of thing shall be well." And this in the face of every horror, in a world that preceded the invention of anesthesia. They were taught "original sin," and with this came both explicitly and implicitly the instruction, that we must not succumb to dark forces - whether outside, or inside us. We must make our pact with God, not demons; both individually, and collectively. The "cuteness" of our secular Halloween is harmless, except in one respect. It makes light of the presence of those dark forces. It anaesthetizes; deletes in the glare. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top