Spooktacular Faith

We have new neighbours next door and they are a lovely younger couple who seem disinterested in Halloween. Phew. The previous renters were there for a decade and we got along well, although they developed an obsession born of yard sales that eventually had me seriously considering buying a pellet gun. From Thanksgiving on their front yard was infested with Halloween inflatables that proliferated. I know, rationally that they were picked up at the yard sales but part of me wondered if they were spawning in the night. 

Halloween, actually All Hallows Eve, is a religious holiday gone mad, now a billion dollar industry. It was meant to be spooky, the thin place between this life and the next, connected to All Saints and All Souls. Instead it has become "spooktacular", a ghoulish secular spendfest (said the curmudgeon). After all, isn't this in good fun? 

Recently I was intrigued by the headline Making Christianity Spooky Again, actually a review of a new book called Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age by Rod Dreher. 

According to the review: 

 Dreher argues that the contemporary West is disenchanted. This term can mean many things, but Dreher defines it as “the evaporation of a sense of the supernatural within the world, and its replacement with a belief, sometimes unacknowledged, that this world is all there is.” A disenchanted society is materialistic, rationalistic, individualistic, and hedonistic. It is unspooky. It is not open to the transcendent, the divine, the mysterious, the inexplicable. It is closed off by design.

I think this is an accurate assessment although it seems to me that there is plenty of yearning out there for the spooky, in strange and perhaps not so wonderful ways. The Halloween obsession may be an aspect of that longing, and so are sporting events with tens of thousands of fans who gather in parking lots beforehand for "communion." The Taylor Swift world tour is an astonishing phenomenon which seems to be seeking transcendence. 

The weird existence of megachurches in the United States could be an example as well. Music is a vehicle for what is often the equivalent of a concert tour rather than a worship experience. We were in Jerusalem and the Garden Tomb on Easter Sunday morning two years ago and while I don't doubt the sincerity of the leadership (the guest preacher was quite good) there was a sense that it was orchestrated. Dare I say I appreciated the birds and the butterflies in the trees and bushes the most. 

I don't have a straightforward answer for re-enchantment of Christian faith in our North American setting yet we might begin by asking how we are open to "the transcendent, the divine, the mysterious, the inexplicable."  There is a lot about the mystery of my faith in Christ I don't understand but I figure that's a good thing. 

On Easter Eve in Jerusalem we visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchure, a freaky ancient church where worship somehow conveyed mystery, wonder and, yes, the best sort of  spookiness. Thank God, Three-in One. Happy Halloween?!