Boo-ring

I never cared for Halloween while growing up. The costumes were OK--I usually was a hobo. (One year, I went in drag to the school Halloween party, leading to somewhat embarrassing results. I talked about it in a sermon here.)

But my taste in candy, the collection of which is a real object of the holiday, was limited. I liked Hershey bars, candy Kisses, Milky Way bars, and Tootsie Rolls. That was pretty much it. (Today, Milky Ways are too rich for me and it's probably been ten years since I ate one. I picked up a Tootsie Roll offered to customers at the tellers' windows of our local bank a few weeks ago and was glad when I finally got the thing chewed and digested...probably my last Tootsie Roll. I doubt of the thing is fully digested yet.)

If baked goods--cookies, cakes, breads, snack cakes, and pies--were what people had given away on Beggars' Nights when I was growing up, I would have been a lot happier. I can also guarantee that, as a result, in adult years, I would have become the subject of a reality TV series, Rescue of the Morbidly Obese Twinkie Inhaler. (It may have become a Halloween classic.)

The other reason I never cared for Halloween is the holiday's emphasis on ghosts, ghouls, witches, graveyards, and monsters. That stuff creeped me out. I remember that I was the only member of my Cub Scout den who didn't watch Chiiler Theater on Columbus' Channel 10 every Friday night. "Hey, stay overnight at my place. We're all going to watch Chiller," one of the guys would say. "That's OK," I'd answer and come up with some excuse about a prior commitment I had from 11:30pm on Friday through 1:00am on Saturday...when I was ten years old. (I'm pretty sure that the other guys knew I didn't have prior commitments.)

I did stay up to watch Chiller one night. WBNS presented a double bill, each film considered, by some, to be great movies: Frankenstein and The Mummy. I already considered myself a sort of film aficionado (I doubt that I knew that term, which I'm sure I heard used for the first time years later by a sports radio host), so I had to see these classics.

But I arranged to watch them lying between my parents in their bedroom. It didn't matter if they fell asleep while Boris Karloff improbably chased down people able to run while he ambled, slowly dragging one foot behind him, in The Mummy. I knew that as long as my parents were with me, I wouldn't get done in like the little girl with the flowers in Frankenstein.

So, between the emphases on being frightened out of one's mind and the bags of candy I never ate, Halloween has, for me, always been something more to be endured than enjoyed.

Now, comes yet another reason for indifference to Halloween: Its hypersexualization. Young women, who should be confident in themselves, instead put on shows for young men, betraying a need to be validated by men, rather than believing in their own intrinsic value. "Girls like to get attention from guys, and guys will gladly give it to them," says one female, a junior at Ohio State, in an article on "sexing up Halloween" that appears in today's Columbus Dispatch.

In willingly putting on a sex show, these young women both devalue sex and elevate it to a place far outweighing its importance. That shouldn't surprise, I guess. It fits right in with a generally sex-obsessed culture.

Back in the 1970s, when I myself was a student at Ohio State, I entertained the notion that the fledgling women's movement, with which I was sympathetic, would finally drive a stake in the heart of the objectification of women. I thought that women would be seen as equal and serious human beings, not as sex toys or masseuses for the male ego.

But the opposite has proven to be the case. Today, we find younger children dressing in sexually suggestive ways and, consistent with patterns historian Christopher Lasch first identified in the late-1970s, we see people extending their adolscent hormonal obsessions deep into adulthood.

Don't get me wrong. Unlike candy or monster movies, I like sex. Also unlike those aspects of Halloween that have perennially bored or frightened me, sexual intimacy is, I believe, the invention of God. And when the gift of sex is used as intended by God, it can be as God implicitly describes it in Genesis, "very good."

As I read the Scriptures, which I believe are the inspired Word of God for humanity, I see three functions for sexual intimacy:

• a sign and seal of the commitment of husband and wife to one another
• an opportunity for a husband and wife to bring pleasure to one another
• and, sometimes, a means by which a family may be created

Sex was never meant to be a thing in itself, but a wonderful subordinate reality. Not an object, a gift along the way of married life.

But, with our human penchant for misplaced priorities, we've allowed sex to become more like a god than a gift from God. We have both cheapened it and, in many ways, from porn to slinky Halloween costumes, monetized it.

It bores me and it saddens me. It even frightens me.

[UPDATE: Over at The Moderate Voice where I linked to both the Columbus Dispatch article mentioned here and this post, a commenter apparently thought I wanted to limit or eliminate people's freedom to wear sexy Halloween costumes. That person wrote:

Halloween isn't just for kids anymore. If adults (male and female) want to dress up sexy to attract the opposite sex, isn't it their right to do so? Doesn't bother me too much, since I'm neither a social conservative nor a prude. Not surprising that some Americans will be in an uproar, the Victorian roots of this nation makes it inevitable. I for one approve of the more sexually [sic] openness of Europe.

I responded:

No one is arguing about people's rights. At least I'm not. Of course, people have the freedom to choose to wear whatever they wish.

I just find it interesting how we sexualize so many things and then monetize sexuality.

Our absorption with things sexual seems disproportionately obsessive to me.

To observe trends is not the same as advocating a curtailment of people's freedoms.

By the way, I find a lot of the efforts to break the Victorian envelope sort of boring, tedious, and redundant. The envelope got broken a long time ago. Few things are really shocking, taboo, or countercultural any more. A lot of people who think they're being daring are really only repeating the supposedly daring acts that have been done continuously in recent decades. That's why I think the sexualization of Halloween--like the sexualization of almost everything else in the culture--is "boo-ring," a yawner.]

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Happy Hallowe'en!

[Here's a piece I wrote several years ago about Hallowe'en and its historical background. I hope you enjoy it.]

The History Channel has an interesting essay on the background of Halloween, October 31. As is true of so many of our holidays, Halloween has gone through many different permutations and was reclaimed and reshaped by Christians.

Halloween has become a huge industry. When I was a boy, it was a sleepy little holiday and it was only because of my parent's prompting that I even went out trick or treating. (I never liked candy. My sugar and fat weakness has always been baked goods.) Today though, Americans spend more on their Halloween celebrations than on any other holiday except Christmas: $6.9-billion!

Of course, some regard this as a dire and disturbing trend. But I see nothing wrong with Halloween. Most of the tales about witches and such are nothing other than classic tales of good versus evil.

The word, Hallowe'en, of course, is a contraction for the words hallowed [or holy] evening. It gets its name because it's the eve before All Saints Day, a time historically set aside by Christians to remember believers in Jesus Christ who have died. (When the New Testament uses the term saint, it doesn't have some super-spiritual person in mind. A saint is nothing other than someone who follows Jesus Christ, a person who has, on faith, received the gifts of forgiveness and eternal life offered by Jesus.)

For a Lutheran like myself, Halloween is also Reformation Day. It was on All Saints Eve, October 31, 1517, that a young monk, priest, and scholar named Martin Luther posted points for debate (his 95 Theses) on the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. (Church doors were used like our bulletin boards are today.) Luther challenged the Church to re-form itself around the simple truth that a relationship with God cannot be earned or bought or bargained for. It comes as a free gift to those with faith in the God we meet through the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.

Luther's theses set off a conflict of volcanic proportions. Thank God, we live with its after-effects today.

A few key passages of Scripture to consider this Reformation Sunday:

16 ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

17 ‘Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.' [John 3:16-17]

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. ¹⁷For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, ‘The one who is righteous will live by faith.’ [Romans 1:16-17]

21 But now, irrespective of law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, ²²the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, ²³since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; ²⁴they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, ²⁵whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; ²⁶it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus. [Romans 3:21-26]

You were dead through the trespasses and sins ²in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. ³All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. ⁴But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us ⁵even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— ⁶and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, ⁷so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. ⁸For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— ⁹not the result of works, so that no one may boast. ¹⁰For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. [Ephesians 2:1-10]

16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. ¹⁷So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! ¹⁸All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; ¹⁹that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. [Second Corinthians 5:16-19]

This Halloween, as you pass out the candy to the trick-or-treaters, you can also remember that God willingly gives us the greatest gift any of us could ever want: brand new life with Him forever, forgiveness of our sins, and the power to become our best selves with God living inside of us.