All Hallows' Eve

Revelation 5:6-12 / Luke 6:17-23

Do you like your Halloween silly or terrifying?

Judging from the range of expressions of the holiday across the United States and in those other countries that have come to celebrate it as well, we can only safely conclude that the response is mixed. For some, the ghoulies, ghosties, long-legged beasties, and things that go bump in the night are quite clearly marked out for fun and mockery. The reanimated corpses scare about as readily as Herman Munster, the vampires as successfully as Count Chocula, and apparently we like it that way. It is though this crowd wants to insist that the panoply of evil which parades from door to door or from bar to bar is best mocked, made light of, occupying a safe realm somewhere between Saturday morning cartoons on the one hand, low comedy and burlesque on the other.


For others, however, it is the fright, the terror, that ought to be front and center. On this view, if there is any fun to the night, it can only be had by there being at least some capacity to suspend one's awareness that this is all safe and in good fun. If we cannot, for a moment, worry that the horrid man with the axe who chases us out of the haunted house or through the field of corn, then why go through the charade? If the trick-or-treaters do not have at least a little anxiety that, maybe just this time, the horrid witch who answers the door will not give them candy but rather boil them in her cauldron for dinner, then something important is lost in the whole experience. As with a horror movie rated only PG-13, admitting anyone above the age of 13 years, the audience would know what cannot be shown, what level of horror cannot even be hinted at, and so is ultimately left, apart from a startle or two, altogether unsatisfied.

What this latter group knows, perhaps directly, possibly only unconsciously, is that the evils which we face on Halloween are, each in their own way, all too painfully real. We live, after all, where there are long to be healed of their diseases, where good men and women are troubled with unclean spirits. Even, indeed numerically especially, among the company of God's Church, we see those who are poor, that hunger now, that weep now, the victims daily of hatred, being separated, reproached, their very names cast out as evil, all for the sake of the Gospel. To pretend that the victory of Christ over the powers of Death, Hell, and Sin means a world or a Church untroubled, free from the ghastly and deadly tricks of the legions of the night is to fail to see at all.

All the same, while people young and old keep this day, and with good reason, with goblins and terrors, defanged or red in tooth and claw, the Church does not clothe herself with tales of terror and demonic oppression. Rather, she recalls that at Jesus' hand, those who were diseased were healed, those troubled with unlean spirits were cured. She recalls his assurance that the poor's is, and not merely will be, the kingdom of God, that those who hunger and weep now are nonetheless blessed. All of this we know because, no less now than then, virtue went out from him, and healed all. If the Church casts its eyes on creatures, it is not moldering revenants from the tomb, not specters and wraiths assaulting the living in envy of their life, but the four living creatures, and in the midst of the ancients, a Lamb standing as it were slain, having seven horns and seven eyes: which are the seven Spirits of God, sent forth into all the earth. The sounds she hears are not creaking doors, cackling hags, and the flapping of bats' wings, nor the odors those of apple, pumpkin, and a freshly-dug grave, but harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints.

It is not that the Church forgets on the Eve the reality of sin and evil and its continuing presence in our lives. Rather what she affirms with full confidence, for she has it from Jesus Christ himself, is that Death, Hell, and Sin, not only are not the final word come the Last Day when the trumpet sounds, but that they are not even the final word now. What the Gospel gives us as Good News is that, even now, even in the midst of the monstrous and the horrible, Jesus Christ, the Lamb who was slain, is with us as Victor and King, and that from his power and virtue, we have not enough life to make it through, but the very font of Life itself.

However we keep this night, in prayerful vigil, or in vigil under the blanket in a darkened room watching scary movies, or in fact dreading the awful and real terrors of our lives, we know that Jesus Christ is Lord here and now, that we are his, and that no wound, no injury, no injustice, not even the mightiest and most terrifying works of the Devil himself can overcome the Love we know in the Lamb.

Thou art worthy, O Lord, to take the book, and to open the seals thereof; because thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God, in thy blood, out of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation. and hast made us to our God a kingdom and priests, and we shall reign on the earth. ... The Lamb that was slain is worthy to receive power, and divinity, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and benediction!

Commemoration of SS. Chrysanthus and Daria, Martyrs

2 Corinthians 6:4-10 / Luke 11:47-51

In his story "The Cask of Amontillado," Edgar Allen Poe presents us with the horror of being buried alive. Told from the perspective of the murderer, Montresor, still unrepentant some fifty years after the deed, the story tells how Montresor lured Fortunato, whom he accused of a thousand unnamed injuries, into the catacombs beneath his palazzo. It was Carnival, and Fortunato, decked in jester's motley, although already drunk from the festivities, is enticed by Montresor into the deep, dark tunnels to taste what Montresor insists is the finest cask of Amontillado. Throughout their journey, Fortunato, already looking foolish in his costume and addled by drink, assures his host of the rightness of his own opinion about wines, the nobility of his lineage, and the solidity of his constitution, brushing off his cough from the damp as no trouble at all. However, tricked into an alcove, Fortunato finds himself chained to the wall, and Montresor then finishes the deed by walling a quickly-sobering Fortunato into the alcove, left with only the dying light of their torch as a companion before his inevitable death. Even his final plea to Montresor — "For the love of God!" — is echoed in a more vindictive and triumphant tone — "Yes, for the love of God!"

The lives of Chrysanthus and Daria present us with quite a different account of being buried alive. Like Fortunato, Chrysanthus was a man of noble birth and, in the eyes of his father, he also dressed up as a fool, drunk with falsehood. However, his folly was nothing other than the new life he discovered in reading the Acts of the Apostles, his jester's motley nothing other than the new man put on in baptism. When his father tried, and failed, to entice him with wanton women, and subsequently arranged his marriage to the Vestal Virgin, Daria, to bind him more powerfully to the world, Chrysanthus found in Daria instead of chains another who came to embrace the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and instead of a wall and burning torch, together they found light of faith and the gates of heaven. Even when he was subjected to torture, he never submitted, and his sober drunkenness and holy folly turned his persecutor, his persecutor's family, and many other to the Gospel. Ultimately, for unnamed injuries to Rome, Chrysanthus, Daria, and those they drew to Christ, were put to death, the happy couple being buried alive. Indeed, so great was the malice against the Gospel that others who came to venerate them, Diodorus and Marianus, were likewise entombed alive in the crypt where the martyrs' bodies had been placed. All of this, indeed, for the love of God.

We can have no doubt that Chrysanthus and Daria lived out the vision of the ministers of God presented by St Paul. They maintained the faith as surely in tribulation, in necessitis, in distresses, in strifes, in prisons, as they did in chastity, in knowledge, in longsuffering, in sweetness, in the Holy Ghost, in charity unfeigned, in the word of truth, in the power of God. Yet, when we venerate their names, what part do we play? Is our memorial like that of Diodorus and Marianus, who, for the love of God and his saints, suffered the awful death of being entombed alive? Or is our memorial like that of the scribes and Pharisees and bear witness to our consent of the killing of the prophets of old, even while they build monuments in their honor? Do we, in fact, recall the martyrs' deaths as Montresor did Fortunato's?

Certainly, neither we nor the scribes and Pharisees intend in any direct way to imitate the cruelty of those who slew God's holy ones. All the same, the only honest monument we can erect is conforming our own lives to theirs, to be so related to them in love that we, no more than they, have no fear of the death. It is in our wearing the armor of justice, up uprightness to ourselves, to our neighbor, and to the poor, that our veneration of the heroic saints is for us a badge of honor and a source of merit, rather than a witness to our hypocrisy and a basis for condemnation.

Honor the lives of the martyrs we must, and call upon their aid in our lives without hesitation. Yet, as we draw to Jesus Christ by drawing close to them, do we consent to meet the same fate as they did? Are we ready to be entombed by the wickedness of the world, knowing that in death as much as in life, we are no less alive in Christ Jesus our Lord?