For many people there is a reflexive shudder that rips through them upon seeing homes decorated for Halloween. They clutch the pearls of their souls as their color drains to ghostly white.
How can you like something so morbid?
I draw tremendous comfort from Spooky Season.
I know what they’re talking about; I’m not irredeemably dense. But in another, important sense, I don’t know what they’re talking about. Because I draw tremendous comfort from Spooky Season. I see the same ghosts and skeletons in people’s yards and windows and I feel comfort. A chilly comfort, to be sure, but chills are sometimes just as necessary as warmth.
I have found myself comforted and nourished in this way for as long as I am able to remember. I enjoy it, even thrill to it, but the feeling is always joined with a sobriety that acknowledges the darkness of the world. Not the darkness of evil, necessarily, but the shaded frontiers of existence that scoff at the human attempt to control reality.
Halloween needs no defense—it is, after all, a Christian holiday. It is inextricably linked to All Saints Day. All Hallow’s Eve can only be what it is named if it directly precedes and prepares us for All Saints, the commemoration of the faithful departed; those who have died but whose witness persists. It seems to me that the hostility many show towards Halloween is rooted in a simple truth: that the reflection we like least is our own.
For me, this past Halloween was mingled with grief as my grandpa had died only a short time before, in August, almost on the anniversary of my grandma’s death the previous year. This was hard in itself, but I knew the coming fall would carry with it further notes of melancholy.
I did much of my growing up in my grandparents’ home. After my parents’ divorce, my grandpa was (in many regards) functionally my father. My sister and I often spent time after school with our grandparents until our mom’s shift was over. Homework was done and dinner was eaten at their table much of the time. And when trick-or-treating came around, our quest would usually begin there.
There was a day when I was eleven that I was suddenly seized by the fear of losing my mom. It wasn’t that she had a dangerous profession or that any direct danger threatened her: my fear was rooted in something more basic. She had custody of my sister and me and unfortunately, because I was a fallen human being, I sometimes said things in the heat of the moment as she walked the burning tightrope of post-divorce existence with the two of us—things I only ever meant in bursts of childish frustration and never with true sincerity.
This combusted one afternoon and I found myself engulfed in a millstone-heavy anguish. Suddenly the truth shone through: these strains in my relationship with her weren’t her problem but mine. I was swirling in a morass of guilt and terror over the prospect of her dying while thinking that I didn’t love her.
Five decades of sobriety—of mentoring and providing for others—made him no stranger to death. That man died daily for half a century.
I took this fear to my grandpa who directed me to Scripture and to Luther’s Small Catechism. He told me that the only prescription for the fear of death was trusting Jesus. My discipleship began with him, and he taught me what taking up one’s cross looks like. The little intimations of what he had once been like (which I had gathered in years previous to this) were now fleshed out as he told me of his former enslavement to alcohol and of how, when he was ready to kill himself, Jesus interrupted his despair.
We only ever really understand in retrospect. That moment was important in assuaging my fear, but also in setting a course for my life that I would take up more fully years later. But looking back on it now, I also see how his near adoption of my sister and me was another instance of cross-carrying and Christ-following. He had been spared from taking his own life so he could pour it out for others. Five decades of sobriety—of mentoring and providing for others—made him no stranger to death. That man died daily for half a century.
I walked through the old neighborhood at the beginning of October. I was in the area for work and felt compelled to make a pilgrimage through this hallowed ground. The air was damp with memories of previous Halloweens, saturated with four decades of tears at turns joyful and grievous. Some were released in the moments that provoked them; others were suppressed in anger or fear or resignation or an aching amalgam of the three.
All of it seeped into me as I walked through the neighborhood, soaking my heart and my mind’s eye in the visions of times past, of sights that no longer are and of sounds that now echo only in the chambers of my secret heart. I was delighted to see the houses I have known for so long blooming with Halloween life. There have always been plentiful decorations and spooky festivity here. But I was simultaneously laid low by the fact that with Grandpa gone, there was now no reason for me to bring my kids here to trick-or-treat.
Halloween has come and gone, but its bonfire silhouettes stretch into November. This month is classically a time for contemplating death, and Advent (which is fast approaching) traditionally reflects upon the four last things: death, judgment, Heaven, and Hell.
That that is news for many people testifies to our collective neglect of death. A prevalent cultural posture has made inroads into our ostensible counterculture. We are as rattled by death, it seems to me, as our unbelieving neighbors, if not more so.
How could death not frighten us? I grant that. But that’s not the final or most crucial question, is it? It’s where we tend to stop with many things. We in our place and time, despite our pretensions, are not fearless so much as eager to banish fear; fear is what we’re most afraid of.
To ignore death, to try to swat it away like a pesky fly, is to chase away the painful beauty of recollecting Grandpa and all of the beloved ones we have lost. We lose them much more severely if we try to cauterize the wound of their death by functionally erasing death from our symbolic universe.
The point of “Remember you must die” is to remember to live well.
Death certainly can be ignored for a time, but it isn’t wise to do so. Because if we pretend it isn’t there and doesn’t inform right action and right belief, we miss out on genuine life and genuine love. So much of our activity as a culture is rooted in this sort of denial. So much of what we call “life” hardly deserves the name; so much of our lives is shot through with death. There is a destructiveness that hews to so many of our habits and preoccupations, but there is also a futility that etches away at our endeavors.
People often assume that the knowledge that we will die will provoke carelessness and hedonism, when in fact the very opposite is the case. It is when we banish death from our hearts and minds—when we fool ourselves that life will continue as we have manufactured it to be right now—that we surrender ourselves to our lusts and nurture our addictions. Death can awaken us to forsake the living death for which we routinely settle.
The ancient practice of memento mori wasn’t an exercise in morbidity. The point of “Remember you must die” is to remember to live well. And to live well, really, is to die rightly, both today and over the course of your life. To love, after all, is to die a little in serving the best interests of another. It is to die another’s death in bearing their weaknesses, in escaping the pit. It is “something given / and taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender,” as T. S. Eliot articulated in “The Dry Salvages.” It is the shape of Jesus’s life.
If this is morbid, then I fear that grace itself is morbid. As with anything good, if we try to take only what we want we will grasp a strand and unravel the whole. We cannot have the comforts of the gospel without the mirror that shows us what we really are.
There are few things more undignified than a corpse that refuses to admit it is dead. And this is us, much of the time. Is this not what we fear to admit: that we are dead? We intuit this in our failures. We sniff it like incense rising off of our inability to live as we ought. We feel its frigid heft in our weariness at having to try again another day.
Being alive to the forces that enslave us and pull us away from Christ isn’t much of a life. We should want that way of being to die.
The good news that can only be heard as good news is on the backside of this: that we are dead, and our life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). We need to be awoken to the fact that being alive to the forces that enslave us and pull us away from Christ isn’t much of a life. We should want that way of being to die. We fetishize life in such a way that we ignore what any particular death ends or begins: we simply recoil and repress. Ironically, the light that shines in the darkness is the source of the shadow that we shun.
Scripture uses precisely this imagery both in indicatives and imperatives. “You have died,” Paul asserts in Colossians 3, stating what is the case. To recalibrate our moral imagination he urges us to “consider [ourselves] dead to Sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11). And joining the two, he grounds future hope in present death: “If we died with him, we will also live with him” (2 Timothy 2:11). Death is fundamental as a beginning and as an ongoing reality for Christian faith.
We cannot be Christians, then, and totally or exclusively abhor death. Our initiation into Christian faith, after all, is a kind of death: the death of Jesus Christ reaching into the present, into our tumultuous, divided subjectivity through the operation of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit draws us into that death, to share in it, to undergo destitution, crucifixion, and burial. And though we live thereafter we live a split perspective, whereby we are alive to Jesus Christ but dead to sin. To be alive in any worthwhile way means embracing not only death but an ongoing being–dead of the right sort.
But this is a metaphor! some will say. When you counter in this way, are you not diminishing what metaphor means? A metaphor is not a falsehood. It is a truth that bursts the limits of ordinary language. Metaphor illuminates empirical fact by bringing speech beyond the confines of the prosaic to its profoundest, truest utterance.
Poetry is in the business of redescribing our world and our relation to it, of showing what is by guiding our eyes towards the strange shape of reality with words that clear the fog of everyday perception and show the wonderful otherness of things.
There is something salutary and edifying about the gloom of death and the grave if we will not look away in instinctive revulsion.
This has an important witness in the English poetic tradition that is sometimes called “the graveyard school.” These writers understood that there is something salutary and edifying about the gloom of death and the grave if we will not look away in instinctive revulsion. Their work was melancholic but, at its best, not self-indulgently so. Rather, there was an attempt to ground both poet and reader in a truth that most people tried to ignore in favor of more immediately desirable (but ephemeral or even worthless) preoccupations.
Several eighteenth-century writers contributed to this body of literature: Edward Young with “Night Thoughts on Death,” Robert Blair with “The Grave,” Thomas Warton’s “The Pleasures of Melancholy.” Even the perpetually anthologized “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray belongs to this school.
Most apt for my point, though, is James Hervey, an Anglican rector who examined this graveyard motif in his Meditations Among the Tombs. He describes in this work “a train of meditations, serious and mournfully pleasing.” A “religious dread” fell upon him as he contemplated these tombs, “remote from all the noise and hurry of tumultuous life.” This dread “hushed every ruder passion” and “dissipated all the gay images of an alluring world.” “The grave,” Hervey asserts, “is the most faithful master, and these instances of mortality, the most instructive lessons.” Even two centuries ago such lessons were necessary to rouse normies out of their drowsy assumptions that everything was fine.
I think it is our “need” to be alive and well that drives us to deny such a reality that Scripture straightforwardly presents to us. It’s the same kind of compulsive need that compels us to insist we are healthy when we are ill or calm when we are agitated or sensible when we are manic and irrational.
Are we not often in something like the position of the Pharisees that cast the blind man out of the synagogue? “If you were blind, you would have no guilt,” Jesus told them. Those who cannot see cannot be held accountable for what they do not see. But because they insisted that they could see, they proved their own guilt (John 9:39-41).
Considered this way, from this angle, with the guidance of Scripture, is there better news than being dead?
It’s the same with Jesus’s statement that those who are well have no need of a physician (Mark 2:17). The mistake is ignoring that the physician has arrived for you: the category “well” exists only in your delusion. None are as in need as those who deny they are in dire need. Help is near to those who can acknowledge their true condition.
Considered this way, from this angle, with the guidance of Scripture, is there better news than being dead? What failure characterizes you and makes you wish you never were? Did you know that you can be put to death with Jesus, and that he wants to share in death with you?
The you that vampirically fed off the life of others? Dead.
The you that exploited others’ distress? Dead.
The you that pretended to have all the answers but never really knew much of anything? Dead.
The you that neglected those who depended on you? Dead.
The you that persuaded yourself and sought to persuade others that no one in history had ever suffered as you do? Dead.
Being alive in any other way requires a dying that happens not only once but again and again as we orient ourselves to genuine, substantive life. To be crucified with Christ is to find oneself newly alive, but with a life that is more than the former life, as it is a life lived in and through Jesus Christ, a life he lives on our behalf (Galatians 2:20).
The truth will set us free, but not before it is done with us, David Foster Wallace assured us. This is only a warning for those who think they can fortify themselves forever against the truth; if we can relinquish this fear and need to already be alive and whole, it will usher in a freedom we have craved and always intuited beyond our failures. We cannot take only what we want.
Spooky Season and the waning of the year is a regularly scheduled encounter with death. It’s a testament both to how our world is not how it should be and yet, in spite of that, there is beauty and life in what Eliot called “the shored fragments of our ruin.” If we can see this, then perhaps we can recognize and take hold of a life worth dying and a death worth living; a death worth hallowing.
