My High Holy Day, por John Zmirak:
All the decorations are up, folks are frantically shopping and preparing, and the anticipation is almost killing me as I await the brightest, best moment of the whole liturgical year: Halloween, of course.
As far back as I can remember, this feast far outclassed Christmas on my personal calendar. No matter that Santa brought piles of gifts like the board game version of The Six Million Dollar Man, the Shrunken Head Machine, or yet one more encyclopedia set which I had begged for. None of this could compare with the fistfuls of crunchy loot that strangers dropped into our sacks, as we trooped up and down the stairwells of our tenements. What made those gobs of candy glow with a sinister excitement was the threat that some might be – must be! – laced with deadly poison, our apples stuffed with razor blades, by evil old crones who were eager to kill off the children. (...)
Halloween provokes contention among American Christians to this day. Some homeschooling friends of mine confessed to me that they felt torn over whether or not to let their son dress up and go trick-or-treating; their Protestant friends kept telling them that this holiday was pagan or even Satanic. And given their theology, you can see their point: The souls of the dead are either in Heaven – in which case they're not walking the earth and need not be appeased, represented, mocked, or even commemorated, depending on which reading you give to the way we Catholics appropriated old pagan customs that marked this time of year – or else they're in Hell, and not worth remembering. Anyone who's dead and suffering deserves it, and will go on suffering forever. There's no sense in attracting his attention. (...)
It's our very comfort with the queerness and creepiness of the whole soul-body mystery that marks the Catholic faith off from its closest competitors. I grew up loving The Addams Family, without knowing quite why, until one day as an adult I realized: These people are an aristocratic, trad-Catholic homeschooling family trapped in a sterile Protestant suburb! Shunning the utilitarianism and conformity that surrounds them, they face the Grim Reaper with rueful good cheer, in a Gothic home stock full of relics. Indeed, I think I might have spotted several Addamses at the indult parish in New York City…
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