Trunk or Treat

I've always enjoyed Halloween.  Ever since I was a tiny person, it's been a favorite holiday, because, well, it's great.  Your house gets decorated, pumpkins are carved.  You get to dress up in a costume!  There's candy!  Also Candy!  And CANDY!

But there's something else, something deeper, a value in All Hallows Eve that pushes back against a decay in our culture.  It was present in my first Halloween, back in 1975, when I donned a cheap plastic Casper mask and trundled out into our neighborhood.  I was six, but my last four October 31sts had been spent in Kenya, where celebrating that day ain't a thing.  So this was all new, this American festival, and it didn't disappoint.  As dusk fell, our street was filled with kids, and with adults, with the laughter of neighbors reacquainting.  Older children bustled about in little self-governing collectives, as the adult were off having drinks with other adults.

With Mom and my little brother along, we went door to door in the growing darkness, our bags filling with candy.

A random neighbor with a pickup truck had filled his pickup with hay and haybales, and was offering impromptu hayrides up and down the main street of the neighborhood.  I was lifted up into the back with a dozen other children.  My brother, being four, was getting a little freaked out by all the hubbub, and didn't join me, so Mom stayed with him.  I whisked off into the evening with a truckbed full of children I didn't know, not a single one of us in a car seat, or even a seat.  The wind was brisk and cool, kids were laughing and showing off costumes, hollering at other trick or treaters, and bragging about their candy hauls, and it all felt like a little bit of a wild rumpus.

That's what Halloween, as a national festival, felt like.  It was and is a neighborly holiday, a time for children to meet other neighborhood children, and adults to meet the other adults who lived around them.  

As such, All Hallows Eve is anomalous and a little endangered, because in our anxious culture, we don't do slow and local well.  We don't know the people who inhabit the same space that we inhabit, as parental sociality is increasingly defined by planned children's activities, social media engagement, and our deepening and generalized distrust of the world.

Into that mess comes Trunk or Treat. 

 

It's a well-meaning thing, as most innovations are.  You go to a church, where the lot is filled with cars.  Maybe also a moonbounce.  Or a face painting station, if they're gettin' fancy.  It's at a more convenient time, it's contained, and it's safe, and there's very little walking involved.  You pull in, unload the becostumed progeny, and boom.  Done and did in time to get them to toddler taekwondo.  For the organizations sponsoring these events, it's ideal from a demographic standpoint.  Young! Families!  To tell the complete truth, it isn't necessarily terrible.  If you're country folk, it can be necessary, particularly where rural neighbors are at a great distance and it's a way to get together.

But if you can trick or treat, trunk or treat is socially inferior, by orders of magnitude.  It feels like a symptom of the loss of authentic neighborliness, which has been supplanted of late with synthetic, temporary, and inorganic substitutes.  It's a manifestation of consumer expectations and overscheduled childhoods.  It offers "safety" and convenience, but at the price of community.

Because who isn't at Trunk or Treat?  

Everyone who isn't a parent of small children.  

The elderly woman, living alone, whose family are distant.  Empty nesters missing their kids.  A house filled with recent migrants.  A young couple still awaiting their first child.  A queer couple.  These, as Sesame Street once put it, are the people in your neighborhood.  Do you know them?  Know their faces and voices?  More often than not, you don't.

"And who," a friend of mine once pointedly said, "is your neighbor?"  We honestly haven't a clue, in these days of madly rushing about.  We roar on by them, stressed and in traffic, already late to our next event.

It's a loss.

Why Your Pastor Should Be a Vampire

Halloween is just around the corner, which means it would be a great time for you to watch a marvelously entertaining recent vampire movie.

It's a comedy out of New Zealand entitled What We Do In the Shadows.

It's not technically horror, but a silly, surprisingly endearing comedy about a quartet of vampires living together in a shared house.  It's considerably bloodier and with two hundred and seventy five percent more death than most comedies, and I don't commend it for family movie night, but hey.  It is entirely worth a watch.

Among the many funny moments was a riff on a classic part of the vampire myth.  Unlike zombies, werewolves, and other monstrous critters, vampires can't get you unless you let them.  Meaning: they are constitutionally incapable of stepping over the threshold of your home unless you welcome them in.  If you say no, or just don't make the offer, they stay out.  They must stay out.

That vampire ethic resonated interestingly against one of my core principles as a pastor and follower of Jesus.

Because there are similiarities between myself and vampires.  I mean, what do I do?  What's my profession?  I roam the earth, trying to share the secret of eternal life that I received from the one who turned me.  I have an intense relationship with crosses, crucifixes, and holy water.  Once a month, I gather with others, and we hold this ceremony where we drink blood.

Admittedly, I neither catch on fire nor sparkle in the sun, but my pasty Celtic flesh does burn in the light of day, so that sort of counts.

The similarity goes deeper, because I share that peculiar vampire ethic about boundaries.

Because it matters to me that your response to faith is authentic, I won't kick down your door to give what I have to you.  If you don't invite me in, I'll stay out.

This confuses many Americans, who are used to quite the opposite.  The expectation, as of late, is that Christians are the ones who chase after you relentlessly, who come at you and come at you and come at you.  They pursue you, overwhelm you, and then eat your brains.

I'm not that kind of Christian.  Those folks are the zombie Christians.  There are hordes and hordes of them lately, I'll admit.  But they are nowhere near as cool, and tend to rot away to nothing in the heat of summer, or freeze solid when winter comes.

I need you to take the step of opening up before I share what I have been given.  I will encourage you, call out to you, and make the path as clear and as attractive as I can.  But I will not hunt you down, or kick in your door.

I just won't.  Because the form of eternal life we Jesus folk offer--one radically grounded in God's love and Christ's compassion--necessarily respects your boundaries, and honors your thresholds.  That's how love works.

You have to open up your door, and welcome it in.

Adult Costumes

My thirteen year old son will not be trick or treating this year, which is one of those wrenching "firsts" that invariably gets parents a bit bleary-eyed.  How can they have grown up so fast?

But that doesn't mean he didn't need a costume.  He's playing the March Hare in an upcoming school performance of Alice in Wonderland, and that meant a recent trip to Party City for a few accessories. The two items he'd rather his dad not attempt to produce out of cardboard and duct tape: a bowler hat and a set of rabbit ears.

To get to Party City, we had to drive past a slightly run-down area near Bailey's Crossroads.  It's an agglomeration of warehouses and gritty little businesses, one of which is the bare-knuckled motorcycle shop where I take my ride to be maintained.  Other industries there include some garages, a cheap used car lot, and a little hole in the wall which seems to mostly specialize in waterpipes, hookahs, and other "tobacco" paraphernalia.

Among the businesses in that gritty little district, there's an...um..."adult product" store.  Most of those businesses have been crushed out of existence by the internet and its false promise of anonymity, but this one still stubbornly operates.  In the front windows, under the couple of neon signs that still work, there are an array of mannequins.  All of them are female, and all of them are wearing outfits that were probably the height of titillation back in the 1980s.  I'm sure, somewhere in there, there are Betamax videos.  I'm not planning on going in to check, but it seems likely.

My son, being 1) observant and 2) a thirteen year old boy, didn't fail to notice the store, and we talked about it for a moment or three.  It gave me the opportunity to reintroduce him to the word "skeevy," which he agreed was an excellent and accurate descriptive term.

We passed on by that gritty section of Baileys, and into one of the strip-malls, the one where Party City lies.  They were in full Halloween mode, with fully half of the store dedicated to costumery for the season.  It was crowded with kids and their parents, all seeking product for the upcoming corn-syrup and sugar bacchanal.

We found a hat, and then gloves, and then a cane, as he managed to upsell his dad in ways that make me believe that being a Vice President for International Marketing may well be in that lad's future.  The final piece of the costume proved a bit trickier.  Fake chainsaws and Avengers outfits?  Sure.  But rabbit ears?  Those weren't available.  Or, rather, the ones we found were tiny, meant for a toddler's costume.

Not being a fool, I knew where else in the store such ears...larger ones...might be found.  I did a quick bit of mental calculus, and then he and I went to the side wall of the store, where there were indeed bunny ears.  It was the section for adults, or rather, female adults.  There were the ears.  They were white, which was going to mean we'd need to dye them to avoid confusion with the white rabbit.  That was entirely doable.

But the wall was also filled with other costume accessories.  Lace masks. Fishnet stockings.  Collars.  Bustiers.  That sort of thing.  Most didn't even bother with the "sexy nurse/ vampire/ librarian/ congresswoman" schtick.  A couple of girls, maybe fifteen or sixteen, were looking over them, clucking, taking pictures with their smartphones.

And my son said, Hey, Dad, this is exactly the same as that other store.

He wasn't wrong.

Suburban Paranoia

My life is, for better or for worse, pretty stock standard suburban.  I live in a modest rambler.  I have two kids and a dog and a minivan.  My weekday life involves a daily pattern of activities that tend to include errands and laundry...and the requisite "activities."  Monday is School of Rock.  Tuesday is Swimming.  Wednesday is Hebrew School.  Thursday is Swimming Again.  Friday we catch our breath on Shabbas. 

Though I'm a suburban denizen, there's one aspect of suburbia I try not to internalize.  It's the...well...paranoia.  Suburbia is an easily frightened place.

When I'm doing the activity-shuttle thing, I sit and listen to the parents around me, who've been thrown together at semi-random based on the schedules they've inflicted on their children and themselves.  As I listen, I hear that there are schedules out there that make mine look like a cakewalk.  Families have color coded charts that lay out the variety of different activities.  Kids leave school, and cram in their homework on the way to karate, which is followed by guitar lessons, after which they snarf down fast food on the way to tutoring.

That endless churning takes a toll on our ability to develop connections where we live...because even though we have a home, we don't really live there.  We live scurrying around in our crossovers.  For some reason, that reminds me of a scripture.  Then again, most things do. 

Earlier this week, I listened to a Mom and a Dad talking about Halloween.  They were lamenting how sad and necessary it was that their kids needed to be driven to go trick or treating at the mall this year.  "It's just so dangerous out there now," said the Mom.  "So many crazy people."  The Dad nodded.  "It's just not safe out there any more.  Not like when we were kids." So more and more kids don't go door to door with their parents.  You don't get to know your neighbors. Communities don't bond and connect, because the world is scaaaary.

This is, of course, materially false.  Statistically, crime rates are lower than they were when I was a kid back in the 1980s and 1970s.  But stressed out, over-scheduled, struggling American parents don't have the focus to realize this.  As they fret about every little minute detail of their kid's lives, they hear from their attitude of fear.  They don't know their neighbors, because they are too busy working and juggling schedules and shimmering with stress.  What little information filters in from our profit-driven media is "Fear! Terror all around! More after these messages!" 

The Big-Parking-Lot churches they attend affirm this fear, filling the world outside of their sprawling campuses with a motley cast of unbelievers and the dangerously unsaved.  Get out into the community?  Work with others?  No chance.  "Keep your kids safe in the hermetically sealed programming of our sprawling Jesus Campus!  Fear!  Terror all around!  Make sure to tithe!"

It's a strange, dark, and fearful place we find ourselves.

Screaming in the Trees

It was a long and tiring Sunday, but in a good way.  I awoke at 6 am, with the deep awareness that the malaise I felt about my sermon was because it wasn't right.  It's hard for a stewardship sermon to be right in a congregation that's running hundreds of thousands of dollars in the red, and heading towards financial collapse.  What I had was too dull, too dismal, too doom and gloom.

So I went for a walk early in the crisp Virginia morning, my pup snuffing and wagging at my side.  The sky was clear and speckled with the morning pink of clouds.  The solution to my sermon struggle was shown to me almost immediately.  Rest and time with the First Book usually does that for me.  But Ellie still needed to walk, so on we went.

As we walked, I heard a ruckus up ahead in the trees.  A small band of fierce brave crows were cawing and carrying on, driving before them a single young hawk.  The hawk was a threat, a threat to them and their babies, and they would have none of it.  They bullied and harassed it into a tree.

They were suddenly joined by some impromptu allies.  A pair of bluejays materialized, ferociously sounding their hawk alarm and joining the fray.  As I walked, and the air filled with birds shouting their territorial alarms and threats, I mulled over how little difference there is between the feathered remnants of the dinosaurs and the bipedal hominids who have taken their place at the top of the food chain.
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After the worship, and the bible study, and some long and hard conversations with church members about the daunting challenges facing my community, I was getting ready to hit my office to wrap some things up.  One of the elders of the Korean church...a particularly difficult human being...suddenly materialized. He seemed angry, which is not much of a surprise, given that he almost always seems angry.   "There is a stranger in the sanctuary," he said, clearly annoyed at this invasion.  "You need to deal with them."

So I raised an eyebrow, sighed, and went in.  I could see a shadowy figure in the back of the sanctuary, wearing what appeared to be a multicolored hat.  I thought to myself that it might be the young man who barricaded the building a while back, but he and I have talked and prayed together since then.  And he's not really into that sort of hat.  As I got closer, and the face became clear through the darkness of the half-lit sanctuary, I realized three things.  1)  It was a woman.  2)  She was African American.  3) I knew her.  She was the former associate pastor of my home church, who'd served my current congregation as an interim pastor years and years before.

She'd just popped in to see what had happened to the old place, only to be confronted with hostility and challenge.  She was, you know, black and a woman.   For a certain kind of Korean, this isn't just two strikes.  She might want to steal something.

I told the difficult gentleman that I knew her, and I would take care of it, and after she had let him know precisely what she thought of him (such deliciously pungent language!  In a sanctuary! Hee hee!)  I settled in with my fierce sister for a long lovely chat.

Such a strange, strange place, my church is.

Hallelujah Nights

Around the country, there are thousands of evangelical/charismatic churches putting on "Hallelujah Nights" this Halloween evening. The reasons given vary, but there's a common theme.

It's the "highest crime night" of the year, says a church in Florida. Come be safe! Candy from a Bible Teacher is safer than candy from a stranger, says a church in Des Moines. Who knows what that scary person who lives next door might be putting in the Snickers? A Texas church lets us know that it is providing a safe alternative to the "mischief, danger, and wickedness" that comes when folks do...other things. A church in Bridgeport is providing a "safe alternative." Two churches in Albany are providing a place to go to insure that "nothing happens" to your children.

The common theme to this particular set of Hallelujah Nights is not celebration. It's fear and insularity. And, unspoken in their advertising, the whole "Satan's Night" thing, that delusion that somehow what goes on in the 'burbs on October 31st is a major pagan festival from which Christians need to cower in terror.

I actually see nothing wrong with Christians enjoying a good, wholesome evening of fun on October 31st. Keep the spirit of the event pleasant, and ditch the Golden Rule Violation pranking and destruction. But Hallelujah Night? What bugs me most are two things:

1) The name "Hallelujah Night." It's goofy. Just plain goofy, in the un-self-aware way so often manifested by low-attention-span Christianity. Christians came up with the name Halloween, dagflabbit. The evening has ALREADY been renamed by Jesus people. European pagans never called it that. For them it was Samhain, the festival of the dead. In an effort to transform that holiday and coopt it, we Christians reclaimed it and renamed it All Hallows Eve. Hallows just means "Holy Ones." It's the night before All Saints Day, when we celebrate the Christians who have come before, those mystics and holy ones and great teachers of the faith who built the church. But Christians do not know this, because we are reflexively and willfully ignorant of the history of the church. As far as we're concerned, Christianity begins and ends with us, and two thousand years of the faith may as well not have happened.

If we want to have an event around All Hallows Eve, then we should. If we want to give our kids something that's not too scary and our women an opportunity to dress up as something other than a sexy nurse, sexy vampire, sexy zombie, or sexy Fox News Commentator, then fine. But call it what it is. All Hallows Eve. Or even Halloween. It's been Jesus-fied already, eh?

2) It's Anti-Evangelical. Hallelujah nights play into that squirrelly profit-media-driven American fear of the other. We have to keep the kids safe! Terror all around, back after these messages! But frightened people make for lousy evangelists. If we hole ourselves up and hide away from our neighbors, we cannot possibly be getting to know them. We're doing the opposite. We're looking out at our neighbors and fearing them. They might be pedophiles! Or rapists! Or Satanists! Or Democrats!

This sends a message, and that message is not the Gospel.

If your community sacrifices goats on the streets and your neighbors run around naked and gibbering with their long silver knives shining moon-struck in the autumnal darkness, then by all means have an All Hallows Eve event sequestered away in your church. I'd also suggest that you consider moving.

If not, this is an opportunity to get to know people around you. Not hittin' 'em up with tracts and bludgeoning them about faith. Getting to know them, walking through your neighborhood and match faces with places. It's a chance to be known, to share a conversation, and to confront the social isolation that is such a blight on our society. From that foundation of gracious engagement, many good things can happen. Without it? We're just an unusually successful cult.

Here ends my annual All Hallows Rant. You can now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

The Appearance of Evil

While my little guy was banging his way through his drum lesson earlier this week, I took a few moments to wander down to a specialty store that had opened nearby. It was a Halloween Store. Not a generic costume store, or a party store. The sole purpose of this store was Halloween costumes and decorations, which makes it something like Christmas Mouse for the Trick-or-Treating set.

Unlike the Christians who hide away from this event, I tend to enjoy Halloween a great deal. It's utterly innocuous. In my community and in most communities around the country, it's a wholly secularized time to get to know neighbors and their kids. The candy we hand out to little Yodas and Elves and miscellaneous Cartoon Characters is a source of pleasure for both us and the recipients. The little impromptu block parties and groups of mellow, chatting, friendly parents are a self-evidently good thing, no matter what Jack Chick tells us.

But the store felt...well...off. Not..."good." Maybe it was my mood that day. But I got a mild but unmistakably negative feeling the moment I walked in, a soft gnawing discomfort that didn't yield until I left. It was, I think, because of the way the store presented itself. It was too intentionally dark. It was too commercial, too adult, and too fascinated with the macabre, with blood and blade and horror.

One entire wall was full of "grownup" costumes, by which I mean the costume options currently open to women. They can be anything, so long as it's Sexy. To reinforce this, there were plenty of images of scantily clad hotties on display, to the point that it almost seemed like it was another sort of store altogether. Not that I've ever been in one of those stores. Ahem.

The rest of the store was decorated with elaborate models of the mutilated undead, monsters, and howling, illuminated-eye demons. Full-sized rentable mannequins of serial killers and succubi stood motionless in the back, each framed in a black velvet sarcophagus. The effect was not festive, not silly, not outrageous, or goofy. It didn't even feel particularly creative. In it's zealous effort to market All Hallows product, the store managed to come up with an overall feel that was claustrophobic and mildly menacing.

What struck me was the reaction of the kids. Those few who were in there didn't seem excited, or like they were having fun. They weren't scurrying from section to section. They seemed slightly wary. They were sticking close to their parents.

Evil...even just the surface appearance of evil...just isn't something people like to be around.

Honestly, it was the kind of store that would even bug a self-respecting Wiccan.