Spooks from the Depths

Davidson Loehr

October 29, 2000

Halloween is a holiday that comes to us in costume. It wears a mask, covering a much older, and much different, message. That older message is also deeper, and more valuable. But to find it, we must first unmask Halloween. And after we unmask Halloween, we will find some ancient symbols, parts of a very old myth, and some parts of ourselves.

SERMON: Spooks from the Depths

Halloween comes to us in costume. It wears a mask, covering a much older, and much different, mask. Under that mask, still another mask. And after we unmask Halloween, we will find some spooks from the depths of ourselves and our world. Since you have a lay service next Sunday that will also be dealing with symbols and myths connected to the concept of the Goddess, I’ve decided to take a slightly different approach here, using less myth and more history and social commentary, so you don’t get over-mythed.

Let’s start with recent history. In 1967, by Lyndon Johnson’s presidential decree, Halloween officially became UNICEF day, when little children, dressed as make-believe goblins, frighten you into making the sacrifice of some spare change.

Going back another century, 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. So it was partly a creative way to party. But that too was a caricature, a cartoon. Halloween itself is a kind of mask put on over something much 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 year 336 to “cover” the birthday of the solar deity Mithra, and Easter is a Christian “cover” over older festivals celebrating the vernal equinox. Our November first was the Celtic first day of winter, and first day of their new year. So Samhain was to the Celts something like Rosh Hashanah is to the Jews-a day of reckoning, a day of atonement.

Above all, Samhain was a time when the barriers between the human and supernatural worlds were broken – or as we might put it today, the barriers between the conscious and unconscious levels of our awareness. They believed that the whole spectrum of nonhuman forces roamed the earth to take revenge for human violations of sacred duties. To bribe the gods – always our first impulse, it seems – they offered animal and sometimes human sacrifices. So this beginning of the new year was a terrifying time of year in the old days. It is not surprising that they needed some relief from it. I would not be surprised if the custom of dressing up like goblins and bad spirits went back to the beginning.

This is such fantastic talk! Gods, demons, goblins. When we hear things put in such otherworldly, supernatural ways, we can be pretty sure we’re talking about something terribly primitive, something that has probably been part of our human psyches since we’ve had human psyches.

This business of supernatural powers and unseen forces sounds a little spooky nowadays. Most of us don’t like to think of invisible forces that direct our lives. But they are still present, still pulling our strings, and are often still fearful, though there isn’t anything otherworldly about them.

Let’s go to a different level of history to find a metaphor for exploring this subject of Halloween. Five or six centuries ago, before the Spanish and the English began sailing around the world, world maps looked very different than they do today. One of the most interesting things about those old maps is that in the unexplored areas, the mapmakers used to print “There be monsters here.” Once we had explored and incorporated the rest of the world into our maps, the monsters disappeared. But when those spaces were still unknown, we thought they must be filled with monsters, because we tend to think that everything unknown to us might be filled with monsters — as most of our science fiction movies still show.

Like unfinished maps, incomplete selves and uninformed worldviews are havens for the monsters of our imaginations. The unknown is usually fearful. To defend against it, we create tyrannies of partial visions, walls of our comfortable biases, to protect us from the monsters that always seem to lie just beyond the limits of the familiar. In that way, we’re still like the medieval mapmakers and sailors.

And Halloween, or Samhaim, is one of those special times of the year that open the door, that offer us another chance to incorporate the unknown, to dig deeper into ourselves and make our worlds bigger. When we can assimilate the unknown into ourselves, the monsters disappear. What we cannot assimilate haunts us like goblins and demons.

Another way of saying this is that life’s deepest problems can’t be solved; they have to be dissolved, by enlarging our maps, by incorporating the things that we fear. The solution of the world can’t be found on the surface. It’s not simple. It has to be complexified before it has enough nuance, enough room, to spread out the full-sized map and begin filling it in.

But we don’t tend to do this, do we? We tend to stick to a kind of comic-book simplicity. Our heroes are big bulky physical characters: big bodies, thin characters. Rambo was an angry adolescent who never did grow up. Professional boxing matches get millions of viewers at $50 each on pay-per-view television to watch a few exciting minutes of two guys beating each other senseless. Wrestling matches also earn big bucks, and feature cartoon-like characters with huge bodies and cave-man actions.

Preachers often seem to describe God as though he were just like a bigger version of Arnold Schwarzenneger, powerful and fearful, interested in obedience rather than in our ability to make subtle grown-up distinctions about morality and ethics. That does poor service to the concept of God! Movie superheroes, wrestling champions and even the sense of the heroic have become like brute versions of a social Darwinism, a kind of survival of the biggest and meanest.

Our heroes have become as simplistic as masked Halloween characters, and this simpleness does not serve us well. Religions have not helped this picture much, too often defining people’s refusal to believe in unbelievable gods as faithlessness. But that’s wrong. For the worst form of faithlessness is the fear that the truth will be bad. The worst kind of faithlessness is the belief that there be monsters here, when what there is instead is our failure to see, to understand, to assimilate the nuances of difference into ourselves and our world.

Sometimes I look at our world as a kind of masked ball. Or like playing ostrich, refusing to see beyond very simplistic terms, shrinking our world, and turning it into a fantastic video game between heroes and monsters, winners and losers.

Ostriches hide their heads in the sand, perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of denial. But when they do, they are vulnerable to everything they can’t see, and so are we. The “trick or treat” game of Halloween is like this too. The game was played most directly, perhaps by the Irish adults of 150 years ago. Their trick-or-treating was saying “Reward our masked, phony role or we’ll do terrible things.” This is the message of hate-groups, too, who are also playing masked roles. When a group like the KKK throws its costumed tantrums, it is saying “Support our rage, our non-integrated rage, or we’ll strike out at you.”

When we’re wearing the masks, we easily become the roles, and think that our simple certainties are letting us see more clearly. Really the masks are blinders, narrowing our field of vision, burying our heads deeper in the sand. And then everywhere we cast shadows by blocking the light, something deep inside of us whispers “There be monsters here!” But the monsters are the parts of ourselves and our world that we haven’t learned how to incorporate, how to include on our map. The monsters are not external dangers, but internal failures of integration.

There is a rule in religion, and the rule seems to be that either our world must get bigger, or our defenses must, to protect against the imagined monsters.

I’ll give you some examples of how we draw lines and create monsters to defend a world that is too small.

A few weeks ago I spoke about what I have called “the dark god of capitalism.” I tried to persuade you that putting profits ahead of people has unavoidable, and terrible, consequences. If we are measured by our financial success, if that’s a measure of our worth as people, then financial failure is a personal and moral failure. The poor people, the losers, are no longer our brothers and sisters, but failures, almost like India’s caste of Untouchables. Then we draw lines on our maps to keep them away. They vanish from TV commercials; they’ve almost vanished from TV and media coverage completely.

Not all the lines we draw are invisible. Some are built of reinforced concrete. In Austin, I-35 is one of those lines. We all know what it means to refer to “east of I-35” or “west of I-35.” There be monsters east of I-35 because we don’t know how to incorporate them into our world.

The more people there are without a realistic chance of making a decent living, the more people make indecent livings, and the more people we put into our growing number of prisons. There be monsters there, too: growing numbers of them.

Other unassimilated people may not be considered monsters, but they rarely appear on our maps. The more than 16% of children in Austin living below the poverty line; the roughly 40 million Americans without health insurance, the child mortality rate, the highest in the developed world, the so-called “working poor” who have jobs but are homeless because they can’t afford houses.

These are among the areas of our society that don’t make it onto our maps, that we don’t know how to incorporate into the body politic. We don’t know how to think of them, or treat them, as brothers and sisters, children of God, so we call them other things: the poor, the disadvantaged, the homeless, prisoners, outcasts, and sometimes monsters. And still the number of people from whom we distance ourselves, and of whom we are afraid, continues to grow, and we don’t see that our whole society is playing a masked role that is not worthy of us. Ostriches.

Our masks, are our blinders. They reduce the size of our world, draw the lines between our kind of people and those other kinds of people. Once the map is complete, it’s like a vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecies.

Could it be different? Is it naive and foolish to hope for a change as fundamental as enlarging our world? Am I just spouting ignorant and childish preacher-talk? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s either naive or foolish. We have done it many times in many ways, we just don’t seem to be doing it as well lately. 135 years ago black people were freed from slavery. Just over eighty years ago women were given the right to vote. Less than fifty years ago our public schools were ordered integrated, and less than forty years ago it happened in Texas, the last state to integrate its public schools. During the past thirty or forty years we have seen huge increases in the numbers of women graduating from colleges, law schools, medical schools. Women have gone into space, been nominated for Vice President, become presidents of prestigious schools. I think that the University of Chicago was the first such school to hire a woman as president. She had wanted the job at Yale, the university where she taught, but they would not hire a woman president. I served on a committee with president Hanna Gray at Chicago, and remember thinking on several occasions how foolish Yale University had been to lose such a woman.

The range of acceptable sexual identities has expanded within our memories, in ways no one would have imagined possible fifty years ago. And while some church leaders may still try to restrict options, the fact is that we are now beginning to accept as natural an immense range of religious options and styles. I will be offering one of the prayers at an ecumenical Thanksgiving service next month in which at least eight major religions are represented. This couldn’t have happened during the good old days of Ozzie and Harriet.

In all these ways — and in more ways that you can think of as well — we have enlarged ourselves, our maps, and our world. And with each enlargement, each new incorporation, more monsters vanish, and are replaced by fellow citizens, brothers and sisters. Don’t think we can’t change, don’t think we can’t become more whole, more inclusive, more noble. It’s a realistic hope. We’ve been doing it, and while we still have far to go, some of the strides we have taken seem gigantic.

Each time, in order to grow, we have to confront some more of our individual and societal biases, fears, bigotries. Each time, we must take off another mask. Each step of growth involves incorporating more former outsiders into the organism of the body politic, and expanding the membership of the human family. Each time we do it, we are reaching out to another group of people and saying “We welcome you. You are one of us.” Powerful, magical words.

It’s not hard to make monsters vanish. Sunlight kills mildew, and it does a good job on our demons and goblins too. But first, it takes being aware of them, and it takes the courage to confront them.

In the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” the monster is dissolved in an unusual way. The wicked witch of the West is finally destroyed — dissolved — when a determined girl throws water on her, and she melts. You know, I don’t think it was water that did it. I think the water was just stage business. What dissolved the witch was a girl having the courage to confront her face to face, without blinking. It took a girl who was not afraid of anything. The trick looks like outward magic. But it isn’t magic, it’s growing up.

Ambrose Pierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, defines a ghost as “The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.” One lesson of Halloween is that all of our ghosts are outward and visible signs of our inward fears. Other lessons of Halloween are that ghosts vanish when enough light is shined upon them, and that fears, once faced, can be transformed into possibilities. On second thought, maybe that’s magic after all.