Ben's October Letter
Dear friends in Christ,
A few years ago I came upon the newsletter of an Eastern Orthodox Church I had visited once in New Jersey. It was October, and that the priest strongly discouraged his congregation from celebrating Halloween. “It is a pagan holiday” he said, “and pagans martyred your ancestors. Do you really want that on your soul?” It struck me as uncharitable, and more importantly it missed the point of a holiday season based mostly in dressing in costumes and receiving mild scares. I think about that newsletter article every October.
I don’t, as a rule, enjoy being scared. But I’ll make an exception for a particular kind of media: “the horror movie (or TV show) that has something interesting to say”. More than slashes and jump scares, this kind of storytelling gets to the heart of what is really scary—and really important. Get Out (2017) uses horror to ask questions about race and dehumanization; The Substance (2024) explores aging through body horror. The Netflix series The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass show through ghosts and vampires that losing people we love is what is most terrifying. I could enjoy these kind of scares all day long—because they remind me that maybe the scariest thing is being human.
This time of year—which can seem so removed from the Christian message and story—it occurs to me that for God to take on flesh and live among us as Jesus Christ is for God to take on the horror that comes with being a human being. It is to understand having a body that will die, it is to know the loss of people we held dear, it is to find ourselves limited and shaped by the power of other people over us, it is to experience betrayal and pain. We talk often of God’s love shown to us in Jesus. Perhaps we don’t talk enough about God’s bravery. Because—it must take bravery to choose this, to experience this, to live human life.
If we think this season about what scares us—we realize that much of Christianity is about being brave in the face of real terror. We have faith, rather than succumbing to the apparent emptiness and meaninglessness of the universe. We have hope, even when evil seems to be on a winning streak. And we have love, even though we know we will be parted from everyone and everything we hold dear. Being human is scary: to believe anyway is an act of courage. And it’s an act of courage we derive from God, who took on this terror of humanity for us.
In this spookiest of seasons—we remember that even now, God is with us. Even now, God is teaching us. That God, who is brave, has known our fear. And this is where we put our faith.
With blessings for the fall,
Rev. Ben