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© Davidson Loehr
26 October 2003
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.
Prayer
Let us prepare for the unmasking.
We come here from many places.
We come seeking many things.
Some come for the company,
or at least the stimulation.
Some bring unspoken joys or pains that need the closeness of others.
But beneath it all, we come in the hope that here, somehow,
we may catch a glimpse of something enduring, something true;
something which can support and nourish us,
coax and guide us toward a better life.
We come to remove life’s masks – and our own masks, too.
Let us prepare for the unmasking.
Amen.
SERMON: Boo!
Halloween is a holiday that comes to us in drag. It wears a mask and a costume, covering a much older, costume and mask.
Uncovering Halloween is like going on an archaeological dig, where we go down through layers put down at different eras, each building on what had come before it, and each more watered-down than the earlier versions.
The most recent change came in 1967, by decree from President Johnson. That’s when Halloween officially became UNICEF day, when little children, sometimes dressed as make-believe goblins, frighten you into making the sacrifice of some spare change.
Going back farther, Halloween first became a national event here after more than a million people from Ireland emigrated to the US after the Irish potato famine of 1848. At that time it was the adults rather than the children who dressed up in costumes, pretending to be all kinds of evil spirits and other supernatural beings. They visited homes where friends made offerings of food and drink to them. And I’ve read that the costumes they used to wear were almost always cross-dressing, with men dressing as female characters and women dressing as male figures – so it was a holiday in drag. But that too was a caricature, a cartoon. Halloween itself is a kind of mask put on over something far older, more primitive, more powerful – and, perhaps, more healing.
The Christian church invented Halloween and All Saints Day in the 9th century, then added All Souls Day a century later. They were invented to “cover” an ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain (“Sow-en”), just as Christmas was moved to December 25th in the 4th century to “cover” the pagan Mithraic festivals, and Easter is a Christian “cover” over older festivals celebrating the vernal equinox. Our November first was their first day of winter, and first day of their new year.
For the ancient Celtic people, this was the most magical time of the year. They had only two seasons: summer and winter, light and dark, and their new year began at the beginning of the dark season. Their days also began at night. Our days and years also begin in the dark, but we have forgotten the reason for it. For the Celtic people the darkness was the time of beginnings because they believed the dark holds whisperings of secrets that we need to know. That’s pretty good psychology, and it’s true.
They had great feasts during the three days of Samhain. The crops were in; they slaughtered livestock and threw a big banquet. Afterwards, they threw the bones into the roaring fire, both as thanks for this year’s feast and as a kind of prayer for good crops and livestock next year. The fire was originally called a “bone-fire,” which we have shortened to the kinder, gentler name of bonfire.
Above all, Samhain was a time when the barriers between the human and supernatural worlds were broken. They believed that the whole spectrum of nonhuman forces roamed the earth to take revenge for human violations of sacred duties.
The Irish also believed this was the best time of the year for looking into the future, and they had some great rituals. Many of these involve apples, which were the sacred fruit of this season, for a couple reasons. First, Celtic mythology talked of an enchanted land over the waters where an apple tree grew in the center, with magical apples. Some old myths told of explorers taking trips over the water to find these magical apples, and some say that the Halloween practice of bobbing for apples is a distant echo of this story.
Also, if you cut an apple in half crosswise, you’ll see that its center is star-shaped, five-pointed, enclosed in a kind of circle. This symbol of the pentagram is prehistoric, with dozens of layers of meaning. It has been found in Mesopotamian artifacts of 5500 years ago. And until the Inquisition, the pentagram was a common Christian symbol, as well.
I’ll tell you a few of their old rituals, in case you’re feeling especially Celtic this week. But listen to them, to understand what they are really about, because they reveal one of the secrets of Halloween we usually don’t see:
1. Go into a dark room lit only by a candle or the moon before the stroke of midnight. Turn your back to a mirror, cut an apple into nine pieces, eat eight, and throw the 9th over your left shoulder. Then turn your head to look over your left shoulder. Let your focus go soft, and look for telling shapes/patterns that speak to your intuition. You may find subtle hints to problems that trouble you.
2. Dreaming Stones. Get three stones from a boundary stream between your thumb and middle finger. Put them under your pillow; ask for a dream that will give you guidance or a solution to a problem, and the stones will bring the dream.
3. Slice an apple through the equator to reveal the five-pointed star center. Eat it by candlelight before a mirror, and your future spouse will then appear over your shoulder.
4. Or, peel an apple, making sure the peeling comes off in one long strand, reciting,
“I pare this apple round and round again;
My sweetheart’s name to flourish on the plain:
I fling the unbroken paring o’er my head,
My sweetheart’s letter on the ground to read.”
5. Or, you might set a snail to crawl through the ashes of your hearth. The considerate little creature will then spell out the initial letter as it moves.
Can you hear how these are working? They are like a psychological Rorschach test, where you can read into ambiguous patterns the sign you want to see, it’s a way of getting in touch with your unconscious desires.
So don’t think of this as what the ancients used for science; it wasn’t meant to be science. That’s the first secret of Halloween; it isn’t about another world, it’s about tapping into the depths of this one. Think of it as what the ancients used for psychology. For the meaning of all these myths and rituals is psychological, and a lot of it is pretty good psychology. After all, they wouldn’t have kept doing it century after century if they weren’t getting results.
There is a witty little poem, a Grook, that I’ve liked for years, that tells the secret of how rituals like this work. It is called “A Psychological Grook.” It’s a little silly, but also a little wise:
Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind
and you’re hampered by not having any,
the way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,
is simply by tossing a penny.
No, not so that Chance shall decide the affair
while you’re passively standing there moping.
But the minute the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you’re hoping!
Piet Hein, Grooks, Doubleday, 1966.
There is a second important misunderstanding about Halloween, a second secret. It looks like the one day of the year when we wear masks and pretend to be something we aren’t. If you were here for the Halloween party last night, you saw just how scary you all can be!
But Halloween isn’t the only day we wear masks; it’s the only day we admit that we’re wearing masks. We wear masks every day, and each of us probably has at least a dozen different masks we wear, depending on the occasion.
Our understanding of masks goes back to the Greek theater. Greek actors would come on stage holding large masks in front of their faces. The purpose of the mask was both to hide the real face of the actor, and to give the audience some information about the character. It was called a persona, a role, a fake identity being worn for the purpose of playing a role. And that’s still the meaning we have for masks.
But if you think Halloween is the only time we wear masks, you’re kidding yourself! During the week, we’ll take turns playing the roles of worker, spouse, parent, customer and others. And we play differently and use different vocabularies in each role, each persona. Each persona, each mask, calls for different nuances, and we play them, every day of our lives, don’t we?
It’s not bad. But the danger is that we forget to take the masks off, then they start playing us. And then we understand the meaning of a saying like “What does it profit a person if they gain the whole world but lose their soul?”
I remember an old “Twilight Zone” program about people putting on powerful masks that made them fearful and mean. The power was addictive, and they didn’t want to take off the masks until it was too late. Too late, because when they finally took them off, they discovered that the mask had shaped their face into its own image and they were stuck playing that phony role, forever. They realized they had lost their souls, and everything else they gained no longer meant much to them.
So don’t think of Halloween as the one night we get to wear a mask. Think of it as a time when we are asked to be more aware of the masks we wear all the other days, and see if we still believe those masks serve us, or if we’re losing our integrity, our authenticity, our soul to the masks.
And not only our personal masks, either. It is a good time to ask what masks we are wearing as a society, and to ask whether there too we may be gaining a world at the expense of our national soul.
I’ll talk more about the war in Iraq for the Veterans’ Day service, but we need to talk about our economy, and the masks under which it is operating. We have been in a state of hypnosis about our economy for several years now. Most people want to believe that whatever is directing it is basically good or at least well-intended, and that perhaps it’s just going through normal ups and downs. That’s the pure and honest character we want to believe we have as a society, both for our people and for people in other countries.
But is it? Going into too much detail about corporate scandals is simply – as my Jr. High English teacher used to say – redundundant. Democrats have attacked them, Republicans have attacked them, “Business Week” and The Wall Street Journal have attacked them. But it’s worth just remembering a few of the facts and figures, with the point of asking whether the drama that is unfolding is America at its best, or a kind of masquerade, a masked ball where the leading players include some of our greediest rather than our best.
Among the great corporate frauds of the past few years:
Global Crossing, lost $47 billion for stockholders through intentional fraud, phony bookkeeping
Qwest’s exceptionally greedy accounting trick-and-treating cost stockholders $108 billion
Harken Energy Corporation, when George W. Bush was its Director, engaged in insider trading and accounting trickery which was, like so many others, covered up by the Arthur Anderson firm. Harken shareholders lost $850 million.
Haliburton, while Dick Cheney was CEO, used accounting trickery and lost $22 billion for shareholders.
Enron bilked employees and investors out of $68 billion before declaring bankruptcy. Ken Lay was the biggest personal contributor to the presidential campaign of George W. Bush.
Tyco, the business conglomerate which, through exceptionally greedy self-dealing and tax evasion, bilked shareholders of $100 billion.
Worldcom, the exceptionally greedy telecommunications company that bilked shareholders of $191 billion.
Over the last 2-1/2 years, the nation’s stock markets have lost over $5.5 trillion, or about three times what the government spends in a year. Does it sound like the motives driving our economy have lost their soul, like a masked ball where the dance is carrying us over a cliff?
And above all of these shenanigans there is the notion that it is impolite or politically partisan to talk about it, as though economic policies that affect millions are somehow private and personal beliefs to be protected from discussion. No. The “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was a bad idea when applied to the military, and it will be disastrous if we don’t start asking blunt questions and removing some of the masks, before they too transform the face of our country into something rapacious and evil.
We’re preparing for Halloween, for Samhain, the time of year when ghosts make contact with us to demand reparations for the violations of the past year. It is a time, and they are ghosts, worth anticipating.
Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, defines a ghost as “The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.” One lesson of Halloween, and of Samhain, is that all of our ghosts are outward and visible signs of our inward fears.
I’ve tried to honor the ancient traditions of Samhain by unmasking some of the ghosts that haunt our lives and our society, having a short feast, then throwing their bones into the bone-fire as the outward and visible sign of an inward hope.
The bone-fire seems important, because another secret of Halloween is that ghosts, like vampires, vanish when enough light is shined upon them, and that fears, once faced, can turn into possibilities. Let us confront our fears, secure in the faith that beneath our fears lie unexplored possibilities. Even here. Even now. Even for us.
