Friday Night

Fridays nights with Jon and Amy are either really lame or really awesome depending on your taste. We usually turn on the xbox and watch The Office. Sometimes we will go out... no we don't. we watch a ton of Office.

So... whats been on my mind lately... Halloween.

The boys that I nanny love Halloween. Monster Mash, Frankenstein, black cats... the whole nine yards. I took them to Party City to see all the costumes... Its so creepy. Like super, super creepy. Severed heads.... smoke.... I dreamt last night about some really scary looking dragons and I think its from all the Halloween stuff. It was actually a pretty cool dream... Bean and Ender were there... we were tight. Bean was dying and I gave a truly wonderful my-friend-is-dying speech. But I digress....

My original point was about Halloween. Now... since knowing some people that have been terribly hurt by Satanism... and knowing that Halloween is their biggest day... and knowing that they do horrible things on that day... my family doesn't do Halloween. I think that's the main reason why I get so creeped out by it. I remember enjoying it as a kid.

I've been thinking about the purpose of Halloween... lots of cultures have holidays like it. Day of the dead and such. The psycologists tell us that we have to mock our fears and so we dress up like demons to scare away the ghosts, or like ghosts to scare away the demons... or whatever. I think this is semi-legit. It makes sense to me, and it would explain why children get so into it. They have very little control over their world. Life happens to them. It makes sense that they would feel empowered as the scary guy for one night.

Halloween is just one example of this fear fettish that we have... horror movies and books, haunted houses, ghost stories...What is it that draws people, grown people to revel in these things? Especially since they know that some of it at least, is real. We tell kids... there is such thing as monsters. And some of them believe us... some of the time. But we know that there are real monsters. Real witches. Real demons. Maybe not red ones, with pitchforks and horns... but there is scary stuff in the world. People who kill people. People who do things much worse than kill people. I'm listening to Paralandra on my walks this week and am once again shivering at Lewis' depiction of Satan. If you haven't already, read both that one and Screwtape Letters to get a vision that will get you on your knees fighting off these powers of darkness... until human apathy sets back in... soon enough.

Okay... I'm home alone and I'm kinda giving myself the heeby geebies... so I'll get to the point. My point is this: human beings are starved for awesomeness. We have this need to break out of the common place into something huge and terrifying and totally unlike us. A spine-tingling otherness. Something powerful and overwhemling.

In the end I guess it comes down to what it always comes down to... people trying to replace God, in all of His glory and wonder and magnificence, with something else... anything else. There is nothing so great and awesome, but nothing so frightening to we mortals as the Immortal. We try to fill that need with anything and everything... as long as it isn't the real thing. What a twisted way to replace God only wise, who dwells in unapproachable light!

Thanks be to God that we can have this spine tingling awesome experience which we hunger for with Hannibal Lector or mucus covered creatures ever coming into play.

Okay... thats it for now... cause this keeps not getting published...