Thursday, October 31, 2013

Holy Evening

"There's a dark side to each and every human soul.

We wish we were Obi-Wan Kenobi, and for the most part we are,

but there's a little Darth Vader in all of us.

Thing is, this ain't no either-or proposition.

We're talking about dialectics,

The good
and the bad
merging into us.
 You can run but you can't hide.

My experience?
Face the darkness.
Stare it down.
Own it.

As brother Nietzsche said, being human is a complicated gig.
So give that ol' dark night of the soul a hug.  Howl the eternal yes!"

          -Chris Stevens, Northern Exposure

Halloween means "hallowed evening" or "holy evening."

The first Halloween I can remember was a party at my first girlfriend's home.  I must have been three or four years old.  She was a blond named Twinkles.  Yeah, I know.  I don't remember her real name, only that people told me she was my girlfriend.  Apparently I once punched a kid for stealing my seat when I got up to use the bathroom at her birthday party and found him sitting next to her.  My jealous streak has since subsided.  She moved away to some other part of Long Island when we were still in day care, and I've pretty much been a lone wolf ever since.  Anyway, I was dressed up as the devil at that Holy Evening party.  Red suit, pointed goat tail, pitchfork, the works.

Many religious people fear the devil.  They think he's a real person.  I wouldn't say "he" isn't, but it seems like a cop out to me to blame all the badness on one creature when it's kind of mixed in with everything, albeit in different proportions from being to being.

My Aunt Mary was a born again Christian as long as I could remember.  She died of cancer the day I got my first acceptance letter to a college.  She had already survived breast cancer once when I was young, but ovarian cancer was too much for her.  She had lived a completely chaotic rebellious life in her youth, running around as a crazy hippie with rough people, doing all sorts of drugs and telling people that they didn't know how to live life well.  Then she did an about face when she found herself in jail and eventually became a born again Christian, although still happily telling everyone that they didn't know how to live life the right way.  I love her very much, but I do not love her for telling my sister (when she was only in junior high school) that my parents were going to hell because they hadn't officially accepted that guy who said everyone had to believe in him and only him into their hearts and used the same spiritual playbook she did.  She also wore shirts that said gay people were condemned to burn in hell for all eternity, although well aware that we had a gay uncle on the other side of the family whom we loved very much, whether he was straight, gay or neuter.

I don't mean to make her sound like she was all bad, because she, like most people, was mostly good.  But in trying to shine her goodness, she overcompensated and brought unhappiness to some of those she professed to love.  Even so, she was usually filled with joy and wearing enormous smiles, and cared about her niece and nephew very much.  She would pray for us when we went to sleep, and although I wasn't sure if I believed in that stuff, I loved the soothing sound of her voice and the beautiful things she asked God to do for her family.

When she got sick I inherited her Honda Civic, a little rusted blue hatchback that got 40 miles to the gallon.  I was a senior in high school.  The thing was, it had "GIVPRAIS" vanity plates on it, so we nicknamed it "The Praisemobile."  She died later that year, so the following summer we decided to stop paying for the vanity plates, had them removed and had normal plates put on.  I also took the opportunity to put bumper stickers of bands I loved on the back.  One of them was Black Sabbath.  Strangely enough, within an hour of placing it on my bumper, I went to get gas and an old woman, who wasn't paying attention, backed into my parked car.  It only moved a foot and did no damage, but she smacked right into the new sticker.  Spooky...

There are myriad mysteries in the universe, which makes it more fun to explore.  I don't discount religious beliefs simply because you can't see or prove them with statistical analysis.  You can't see or touch any physical substance scientifically classified as "love," but I enjoy perceiving the world as running on this feeling, this idea, this poetry much more than the "higgs boson" or whatever it is they're down to now.

Even so, I never understood the people who spent all of their time trying to eliminate the devil.  We all get angry when we see injustice, cruelty, barbarism and deplorable violence against the innocent.  But it's complicated.  We began as dust, after all.  Or whatever it was inside the Big Bang when the positive and negative spiraled together from, with and through infinity.  So who doesn't have a little devil in them?  The world has to be fun somehow.  Besides, the religions that don't let their holy leaders (cough! Catholicism! cough!) have sex or masturbate tend to find that their leaders have sex anyway, except they rape young children.  Catholic writer of The Alchemist, Paulo Coehlo, said that sex isn't a manifestation of evil.  If anything you are manifesting God's love when you perform the act.  That is, unless it's rape or pedophilia, which is truly sick.  A healthy understanding of how to give the devils of society a proper release is the best way to avoid the insane extremes you hear about on the news all the time, or much worse, may have experienced yourself.  The primal urges to exert with tremendous force against the stresses and pressures of this world are constantly brewing somewhere inside.  We have to release them safely, creatively and effectively, like a steam valve.  If we can do it enjoyably, so much the better. 

My aunt believed that Halloween was evil because it encouraged children to dress up as ghosts and goblins, supposedly stoking the fires of hell.  Well, the earth began in molten magma, and life began in deep dark oceans with spooky monsters everywhere, life feeding on life, and all of that came out of some sort of mysterious nothingness that scientists now claim is over 70% "dark energy," a mysterious force nobody understands in the least.  I wasn't old enough to bring that up when she was still alive, so I don't know what she would have to say to that.

I don't think the invisible dark energy is anything to fear.  There are plenty of visible, or at least explicable, things to fear.  But the more we get to know them, the less we have to fear them.  The less we have to fear them, the more we love the world.  And the more we love the world, the less the world produces fear to ruin this love experience, whether this love be filled with glorious light... or delectable darkness.

After all, how could the stars shine bright if there were no night?

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