An essay in celebration of the hopeful possibilities in this Halloween Sunday (with photo images of disguises and masks)
Secular holiday and sacred holy day— an American civic hybrid?
By Jim Boushay and Rickey Sain
SUMMARY: The national holiday of Halloween happens this coming Sunday—a sabbath. Here and there the day will provide time for church-going and for rest as well as for the quieter kind of relaxation at home that helps restore balance to fractured lives. Traditionally Sunday offers a change from a too-quick pace in a circus-like world through which we seem to be speeding. What might the frenzied secularity of the Halloween holiday have in common with the more contemplative day of rest and renewal?
Where to find The Beloved Community
MASS IN THE KEY OF HALLOWEEN Come, enter into our imaginations. See if this Sunday's Halloween pageant of merry makers many might be transformed into a zany and rich celebration of a communion of saints and sinners in burlesque. How compelling would that picture be? What might the holiday celebration look like? What's the civic impact?
Let's unmask a few of the more playful elements in our national observance of pumpkins, masks, dress-up, and drag. Is it possible, if only for this year, to imagine that our traditional spirit of revelry on October 31 might be quintessentially an American hybrid, perhaps yet another civic celebration of secularity and religiosity combined? Like our commercialized Christmas? Or maybe like an overstuffed Thanksgiving?
What does Halloween's frenzied inversions of custom by costume, as well as its symbolic and playful transgressions, have in common with the religiosity associated with Sunday as a sabbath? Historically some, if not most, of Sunday is set aside for rest and quiet renewal, for recharging energy levels, for restoring a steadier sense of purpose and meaning in a frenetic circus-like culture through which we're speeding at breakneck pace.
Is the uneasy marriage in 2004 between Halloween and Sunday a wrenching indication of the messiness and tension capturing us in a vibrant—because pluralistic—democracy? Is is time perhaps for adults to consider taking back Halloween, enjoying it for what it can teach us as adults? Certainly let the children continue to laugh and play on this mischievous feast of inversion, abnormality, and weirdness. Who would deny them? Allow them their holiday birthright, the joy of their trick-or-treatings. At the same time will adults take back this one day and moment when the rowdy American feast of benign terror—and wearing masks, disguises, and costumes—can tell us something about our own flawed and fabulous humanity?
Grand rainbow celebration worth further scrutiny?
From past times to now, in Chicagoland and cosmopolitan centers elsewhere, Halloween celebrants—some dressed up, others not—mirror the American community in a diversity of resplendent colors. Some party goers will be masked and costumed in celebrity styles, moving in extremes from the satanic to the saintly, and including many in-between imitations of the famous or infamous. Who perchance will be among the holiday's hopeful heroes and heroines? If out and about, how will we show off the whimsical brilliance of this special autumn day? Who and how will we engage? Why and what will we engage?
This annual Halloween scene will offer up an unusual sense of a grand rainbow celebration worth further scrutiny. A dynamic panorama of humanity's merry makers will be transformed into something exquisitely particular. One mask of bloody horror is counterpoised by another mask of a wide smile and a head of fuscia hair. Or more magically, will this be a living symbol of spectacle at its undeniable best, perhaps generating a newer capacity for wonder in ourselves and in fixing perhaps a conflicted relationship? For seeing new and affirmative possibilities in things?
Will the holiday of harmless transgression and boisterous play be transmuted, if only for a few hours, into a secular miracle of everydayness? Does it have the capacity to rejoice in the sacred and secular dramas of love and hope and compassion? Yes, a lot of questions, and in this instant too few answers. Let's see, though. Imagination has capacity for conjuring the banal and the beautiful in exhilarating unity.
Everywhere, party goers will gather in homes and other private and public spaces for celebrating and cavorting, for eating, drinking, for being merry and dancing. The revelers can be anything they want to be. Among the masked celebrities, for instance, we're sure to find Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, since each now is the stuff of evolving legend and myth, beginning with their deaths within days of each other a short seven years ago, in late summer of 1997.
Along with other masks and symbols of revelers dressed up in costume, the celebrants will be a conspicuous ritual of players on the stage of life, a yearly renewal of an American burlesque drama whose Western European origins are centuries old.
To stretch a point about Mother Teresa and Princess Diana. Each engaged a distressed world in divergent yet overlapping ways, performing deeds of charity, acts of saintly goodness. Though clearly dissimilar in backgrounds and lifestyle choices, both shared an intense vision focused on directing community goodwill, even putting aside the cultural and media hype attendant upon their celebrity status at their deaths.
Would you agree that, on balance, their authority and strength derived from a reasonable dedication to helping others, to healing, to activism and service? The world has categorized both as saints, here an apt designation. Both classical and contemporary uses of the word carry the idea of allegiance to benevolent deeds. Typically, unabashed Halloween costumers, by dressing up in imitation of both the mythic or caricatured, will display special reverence for them as notables and for many others of far greater historical legend or contemporary fame. The young and old will dress up in the garments and costumes of saints and sinners, with the complete panoply mirroring in different ways those still living or now departed.
Yet this ancient spirit of Halloween burlesque and revelry involves much more than the obvious wearing of masks, or the trick-or-treat swirl of old and young. The party also features the rituals of cross dressing, being in drag, painting faces, carving jack-o-lanterns, and the telling of ghoulish tales of mystery, mayhem, magic, and the miraculous.
While originally a secular pagan observance more than 2,000 years old, by the Middle Ages and beyond Halloween had evolved into a spiritual drama played out the evening before the feast for honoring all saints, all the believers who gathered in different localities and regions of the known world. For more than the last 150 years in the U.S., a transformation back to its secular roots has given the holiday a distinction bereft of overtones strictly religious.
Has the holiday now become similar to other national dress-up holidays, while essentially preserving its ingenious look as a colorful reflection of American cultural pluralism at its most compelling and seductive? How does the holiday—can it?—belong to us, in both ordinary and extraordinary ways? Let's see.
Throng of impish and innocent revelers. Mass of humanity
As in years past, this Sunday the dressed up imitators of saints and sinners will be everywhere, engaged in familiar fellowship. This happens amid laughter, food, drink, boisterous behavior, devilish amusements. Party goers will be here and there, around or at home, from out of town, and in and up and down town, on the roads and in the streets, somewhere and nowhere, at places inside and outside. Whether casual or dressed up, the throng of innocent and impish revelers—the citizenry gathered as a celebrating community—will seemingly savor an instinctive mix and mess.
Past years being the guide, the mess will be a human mass, a mass of and for humanity.
Nor will Mother Teresa-like and Princess Diana-like celebrants be the only ones in costume. Others imitators of the legendary and villainous will be garbed in simple, or playful, or eccentric dress, depicting still other saints or sinners. Sir Harvey Milk, for example, might be at the party, as surely will be Her Eminence Tina Turner and Her Excellency Barbra Streisand.
So too in attendance will be others living and dead: Julia Child and the Galloping Gourmet, Sir George Solti, Snow White, Donald Trump, Cardinal Bernardin, Mayor Harold Washington, Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, Maya Angelou, Arthur Ashe, Ru Paul, St. Francis of Assisi.
There too will be Donald Duck, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Benito Juarez, Charlie Chaplin, Sts. Perpetua & Felicitas, Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, and Da Mayor. Intriguing indeed—this mix of helter skelter party goers.
Also there will be Batman & Robin, the Pope, Mao Tse-tung, David Frost, Sts. Sergius & Bacchus, Nelson Mandela, Messrs. Sears & Roebuck, Oprah Winfrey, the Simpsons, Bill Moyers.
There will be the likes of Martha Stewart, Little Bo Peep, Queen Elizabeth, Jackie Gleason, Marshall Field, Bayard Rustin, Roberto Clemente, Joan of Ark, Sojourner Truth, Ronald Reagan, Michael Jordan.
This celebrity roster of heroes or saints might also include such down-to-earth and familiar notables as a brother or sister, a mom or dad, daughter or son, grandma or grandpa, friend or lover, poet or novelist, actor or actress, preacher or rabbi, knight or knave.
Resplendently varied will be the party dress—count on it. Many will be gloriously befitted as themselves, in drag, as cross dressers, or as garbed celebrities in company with still other celebrities, with Wicked Willie hanging out with Goody Two Shoes. Though intended as something of a knockout listing of twisted Halloween celebrants costumed, the complete celebrity roster has genuine punch for its everything-in-the-mix kaleidoscope of the spirits and souls of all the saints and sinners that ever were and that ever will be. The past and future merge in the 2004 experience of Halloween revelry.
Historical and cultural traditions have it that this splendor, this bright community in burlesque and celebration, denotes a rich pell-mell mixture of the past and present spirits of the living and dead. Coincidentally and yet meaningfully, the holiday leads immediately to the Christian liturgical feasts of All Saints and All Souls. Thus we have a cross-section of a communion of saints and sinners, a real and embodied mix of conspicuous holiday party goers, and an imaginative and soulful panoply of mythic champions, both dead and living. The mix inevitably will include ordinary celebrants making up a usual collection of souls and citizens living in everydayness.
Infinite variety, glitzy, resplendent miscellany.
Whether an everyday hero or personal favorite, or a saint or sinner, whether at home or away, whether a king or a queen, a princess or a prince, is it true maybe that Halloweenites can and will delight in a royal carnival of festivities? After all, one would expect no less a festival within the realm of metropolitan Chicago as an acknowledged world-class destination for tourists. Home to eight million residents roughly, it is also the locus of better than 30 million annual visitors from all corners of the globe.
Ordinary celebrants will preside and gather together of course, in spaces private and public to enjoy good times in different ways, and for different reasons. Timid LaTonya and Humble Hank will be officiating. So too will there be such glitzy party regulars as Outrageous Otto, Unkempt Kevin, Vicious Vanessa, Jazzy Jack, Laughing Leon, Repulsive Roberto, Nervous Nancy, Sassy Shawne. Everywhere there too will be Average Joe, Plain Jane, along with Weary Juan, Intoxicated Isadora, Pleasant Pat, Rash Rashonta, Brawling Bruce, and Mah-Velous Maxine. And the rest of the folk.
An autumn cousin to the familiar winter time revels of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, a Chicagoland celebration will also be of infinite variety and possibility. The diversity of revelers will likely go beyond even the simmering melting pot offered up here already. It may start in big shoulders style, a la Carl Sandburg in his 1916 poem Chicago, and then quickly become an electrified swarming metropolis of dressed-up and arms-akimbo folk embracing a frenetic swirl of helter skelter similarity and difference.
Ah, said Shakespeare to the ages, all the world's a stage in any season.
To take the idea of dramatic celebration a step further into our own time, one now-beloved figure, Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, was a conspicuous player on the local and national political stage before his untimely death in 1987. He now comes to mind as someone who, in company with other bon vivants, would be captivated by this Halloween amalgam of humanity's perplexity and plenty. Known for sampling imported beer and inventive culinary eats at community gatherings everywhere, Washington had his co-conspirators.
Elsewhere, for example, are tales of other famed celebrants on the stage of life, including the now legendary stories of the late Joseph Bernardin, given the numerous reports of His Cardinal-ness being the last to leave an official assembly, social outing, potluck picnic.
What about still others among the famous and infamous? In that Halloween mix, that array of celebrants, will we see, will we engage any costumed sinners? In that unofficial autumn holiday assembly, will there be an outcast like Adulterer Hester Prynne, Lost Soul Bigger Thomas, Alienated Teenager Holden Caulfield? Will there be Jealous Othello, Wondering Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, Murderous Bonnie & Clyde, Shame-Faced Bill Clinton, Guilty-Until-Proven-Innocent O.J. Simpson?
Will the party also bring forth, for example, Godfather Don Corleone, or take in an errant police officer or espy a bedeviled drug lord, or show out the cruel and murderous mass of the likes of Andrew Cunanan, or John Gacy, or Marquis de Sade, or Richard Speck, or Ma Barker?
These personalities and personality types will be there, many surely masked and costumed. Creatively and perhaps mysteriously, all in the mix are enabled. They all have the potential to participate in the transformation of a symbolic array of saints and sinners into an assembly of souls in the flesh, souls enjoying a carnival of secular and sacred pleasure.
Collecting the dead, the great, near great, poetic and prosaic.
Granted, this business here asserts both an unusual and a usual reality. It collects a partying and appareled assortment on life's stage—and then boldly calls it a communion of saints and sinners in burlesque. Is this a questionable trick, an arguable artifice by definition? The picture painted here certainly demands a critical eye before coming into sharp focus.
For us the writers, in truth it is really the treat of curious whimsy needing to be satisfied that forms our basis for inviting you—simultaneously our reader and concelebrant—to gaze gracefully upon this resplendent miscellany. Though untidy and asymmetrical, maybe intellectually suspicious, it sparkles with vigor, with spiritual meaning and material fullness. At this party, are the spiritual and material separate spheres of existence? We don't know...at least not yet.
So let's see. Is this untidy collection of the dead, and the great and near-great, and the poetic and prosaic, in fact the communion of saints and sinners? Such a collection will certainly make an appearance in any assembly, in any miscellany of Halloween revelers.
To the point of ad infinitum, the miscellany will also include the stay-at-home folk from polyglot backgrounds and faiths, otherwise working in polyglot fields and disciplines: Healthcare, education, social services, religion, business, law, manufacturing, politics, research, the mass media, hospitality, government, entertainment, other fields. You can name other spheres of knowledge not listed here.
This mixture also takes in any remaining miscellany of still others who, for instance, enjoy cooking or who patronize a health club, or who are struggling teenagers. It embraces lonely and happy bankers, musicians, church goers, busboys, car dealers, roller-bladers, artists, hairdressers, stock traders, yes to the point of infinity.
A Halloween communion of saints and sinners reflects a common yet complex mix of loved ones, including but not limited to, friends, acquaintances, neighbors, co-workers, and strangers. Enough already. Some say each saint and sinner is fully reflective of a community of helter skelter arrangement. It is a mix of the human family grouped together as a splendid panorama. Somehow in perhaps unimaginable ways it reveals a transcendent whole greater than the sum of its secular and sacred parts. Praise creation.
Historically and culturally, the idea of the communion of saints and sinners has embraced related meanings, at least through the last two millennia. The first-century missionary Paul wrote letters of encouragement to African, Asian, and European adherents, calling them saints. These letters were read out loud, encouraging and sustaining like-minded religious communities far from harmonious.
In addition to Paul and many other writers through the next 2,000 years—including the 3rd Century Irenaeus, as well as Benedict in the 6th Century, Mohammed in the 7th, Hildegarde of Bingen in the 12th, Julian of Norwich in the 15th, Roger Williams in the 17th, John Woolman in the 18th Century, and Frederick Buechner and Riane Eisler in the 21st Century—they each used and use the word saint in similar ways. It identifies the individual, unique act of change and rebirth. It describes the act of each living person gradually growing into greater maturity and goodness in the course of a complex lifetime.
Practicing theologians and critics all, these philosophers and writers here, along with unnamed others, shared the simple yet sophisticated belief that the key to creative living was an ever-deepening response to what today we sometimes label The Psychology of Growth.
How is it that they shared in common the conviction that humans grow by pain and joy, as well as by mistakes and forgiveness, and by ugliness and beauty? Why did they believe that negative and positive experiences combined nurture growth? How did they come to teach that people grow and unite not only through suffering and pain, but through celebration and love?
These sympathetic change agents each traveled different paths in separate ages. Yet they taught—because they lived it daily—that everything has a cycle of life, death, change, resurrection. They allowed that the essential quality of compassion-filled growth along the journey is, in fact, awareness. They referred to the conscious process enabling humans to see the transcendent, the infinite, in themselves and those with whom they share finite physical life.
They wrote and spoke and preached that all we are saints. Saints are US.
We become saints, they said, by the combination of specific accumulated experiences shared consciously with others. Is it that the boundless human heart embraces endless experiences? Understand that such an expansive idea often can lead, happily, to further scrutiny and introspection, more dialogue, a greater opening up to mutual enrichment and understanding. Then how do we appreciate the mysterious and real role people are capable of playing individually as unique agents of change? Each of these revered sages said, variously yet decisively, that each person walking the talk is clearly responsible for revivification—for that renewal sought from deep within each person. Each is made in the image of God, with each inalienably having exquisite dignity and incomparable worth.
In the last 200 years, still other philosophers and writers enriched the notions of saintliness and wholeness. The did so—and do so today—by adopting in their writings, among other activities, the conscious process leading to creative change and transformation. Emily Dickinson comes to mind as a favorite, as do Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Sojourner Truth, Jane Addams, Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Justice Felix Frankfurter, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Reinhold Neibuhr, Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Elie Wiesel, Dick Gregory, Buckminster Fuller, James Baldwin, Thich Nhat Hanh, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Kenneth Smith, others. Here have fun by adding your chosen favorites.
Thus writers, philosophers, and intellects before and now have struggled always with transformation as process, a struggle now given greater urgency in the new millennium. Now in 2004 the personal and cultural impact of September 11—fear of terrorism and a greater wariness with strangers—seems to be with us daily in both foreground and background. Whether yesteryear, immediately, or in the future, a commitment to the process of transformation has involved finding practical ways of consciously living out everydayness mindfully.
Dying and rising through change and growth
Lived out in spring risings and winter dyings, in doleful disease and deconstruction, in grief and genuine gladness, the process of transformation flows from conscious daily growth that can often lead to restoration and healing, in any season. This idea of restoration, of a kind of spiritual rebirth, is also captured by another seasonal image from a 1980 love song, still on the pop charts today nearly a quarter of a century later—"The Rose." The song is soulfully rendered by actress and singer Bette Midler, playing rock star Janis Joplin in the movie of the same name: When the night has been too lonely What does it mean, then, to say that anyone is capable of new growth, leading to repair and rebirth? How do Plain Jane and Average Joe—or the lucky and the strong, or those for whom the night has been too long, or the remainder of the folk—restore efforts to become saints, new and improved? Are we willing and able to accept that the answer to such a complex question comes about in part from making daily decisions to embrace, learn from, engage and celebrate the labyrinth of common human relationships?
To take merely one practical example from among many learning tools, contemporary film is uniquely capable of picturing humanity's complexity. In the genius that is the many-layered popular movie from 1997, In & Out, Kevin Klein plays the centerpiece caricature among an untidy assortment of people—a miscellany— living out the routines of their lives. His growth, and theirs, comes primarily through a blending of challenging and affirming experiences, and by seeking uniquely personal answers to difference and change.
Whether rendered in film or expressed in other artistic forms, growth and change come through pain and suffering as well as through affirmation, celebration, and laughter. Sobering answers to the process of growth point ultimately to a decision to lead life mindfully, in rejection and oppression and, yes, even in the pain and isolation of loss and death. "In the winter far beneath the bitter snows, lies the seed..." How do we engage the process of new growth? What does mindful living in the act of awareness—meaning consciously living in the moment—actually look like?
To lead life mindfully is to face it in difficult and serene moments, in put-downs and illness as well as in hope and health. While it means celebrating personal achievements and experiences, it also means praising others without envy. Worth praising, for example, was a friend named Joe Wood. His life-and-death story is remarkable, particularly during a life-ending illness. More about him shortly.
Common acts of virtue, uncommon moral courage
First there is this important question: Who are the saints among us indeed? Do you believe, as we two writers do—however imperfectly—that we are the saints, all of us?
What are the ways they—we?—choose to honor that traditional calling to sainthood? What are the ways leading to transforming change and a sense of wholeness? Biographies and autobiographies, as well as the frequently reprinted Lives of the Saints, tell of routine and dramatic stories of saints and sinners of the last 2,000 years. These inspirational tales of relatively common acts of virtue often tell of uncommon moral courage. They speak of Mother Teresa-like dyings and Princess Diana-like risings. These are stories of ordinary and memorable people undergoing change and transformation, of consciously seeking the mystery and beauty in the other and in all.
Mystery bringing forth beauty is the story of our friend Joe Wood, mentioned earlier. He was a west-Loop graphics printer, killed by the AIDS disease a decade ago in 1994, an all-too-tragic happening then and since. Joe's divergent reflections during bouts of serious sickness, on his final journey toward death, enabled him to enter into its fearful mystery.
During his illness he taught others how to care. Because he died with so much love and compassion for others, the spirit of deep joy—and deep sadness too—was his final gift to friends and family alike. He faced the ultimate reality, mindfully preparing for death by sharing his darkest doubts.
Even within the context of his now-famous vision of The Beloved Community, Martin Luther King Jr. realized that personal growth from pain, like that experienced by Joe, needs darkness and doubt to have the power to heal, even in death.
Several weeks before he was assassinated April 4, 1968, King told friends and family alike, echoing poet Rainer Maria Rilke, that he had "faith in darkness and in the night." In like manner Joe Wood himself, cheerless though serene, deliberately accepted death. It was the culmination of a process of pulling himself utterly into a complete sense of wholeness, therefore reflecting sainthood's splendid light even brighter.
Joe qualifies as a saint in many senses of that resplendent word: In the orthodox sense of membership in the communion of saints and sinners dead and living; in the spiritual sense of undergoing change by overcoming fears, or by being freed from the pain of sickness and suffering; in the psychological sense of struggling to accept death mindfully; and last, in the cultural or historical sense of leaving behind inexhaustibly rich values as gifts to others.
The change that Joe braved at his death at 45, like that experienced by Dr. King before his own untimely death at 39, occurred more than during the final weeks of a doleful disease, or of a life lived in daily awareness of death's probability. "Overnight success doesn't happen overnight," sings pop artist Gladys Knight.
For Joe Wood, overnight success occurred gradually, haltingly, woefully, painfully, in the accumulating experiences and patchwork everydayness of an entire life of sorrow and joy. The same is probably true of Dr. King, say his biographers. Is it not reasonably true that life and death are made up of the virtual and real, the impure and pure, the secular and sacred, all always oddly and cruelly but beautifully merged into a bittersweet mosaic?
Can we doubt that is everyone's life too? As example, Bill Clinton acknowledgment of wrong by lying, and of his need for forgiveness for that wrongdoing, reflects but a page or two (maybe even fewer, time will tell) from our nation's chapter on life's bittersweet mosaic. That story really is a small tale within the complete history of human complexity and struggle. Our own stories of unique transgressions are different, stories of adversity followed by victory. Yet somehow they’re the same.
We citizens of a certain grouping, time, and place, how are our own special stories of utter awkwardness and exquisite grace to become a part of our history? At the end of Joe Wood's life, transgressions and acts of kindness all, his own brand of a simple, yet conscious and mindful embrace of his humanity, as a unique child of the cosmos, was the path to transformation mysterious: Here I am. It is I, just as creation made me. Reaching out to the risk of living with both arms In a moving passage from the novel The Shoes of the Fisherman, author Morris L. West captures the complex risks of that complex process, terribly human risks which Joe and Dr. King confronted earlier, and which still others have to confront now, and still more others will have to engage in the future. Says West:
It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment or courage to pay the price. One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court darkness and doubt as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict but ready always to accept every consequence of living and dying.
Is the journey more important perhaps than the destination? West's expression of faith in transformation as a conscious process is outed with resolute eloquence. Like the life Joe Wood—and others—lived and especially died, West, like the prophets of old, tells us to come out of our closets of fear and insecurity. He says that buying into the labyrinth of being fully alive costs considerably more than a quick-sale, bargain-basement accessory charged to the credit card. Paying cash upfront—meaning, putting our money where our mouth is and walking the talk—buys the practical dress up style required somewhere and everywhere.
Candidly put, it is hard work that sets self-confidence free, unleashed, unafraid.
Though the novel's message is idealistic in whatever context, it can understandably bring forth a skeptical "yeah—right!" Still, it’s a tough affirmation of the power of self-regeneration. To embrace a soulful pilgrimage means there are few smooth stop-overs on an otherwise intricate and jarring journey.
Each stop-over on the way has potential for authenticating anew, however, the ever-fresh wisdom of the sages from hundreds of years ago up to now. Do the sages' personal stories of travail and triumph, of success and failure, match or compare with our own present struggles? Do they resonate with some of the dilemmas and contradictions of Joe Wood, or Dr. King, or others now departed? If yes, how so? If no, why so?
The legacy thus of our ancestors all. Their lived lives and writings and still other expressions artistic, call for an understanding of and commitment to the psychology of growth. This uniquely is the enduring sense that the common and ordinary contain the elusive mystery of daily growth through routine mindfulness.
Life as a bottomless mystery
Our ancestors' expressions of art, philosophy, literature, theology—four of the humanistic disciplines—continue today to speak in the age of technology about the need to embrace the process of becoming more aware, more deeply conscious, of the meaning in common experiences. Real life is lived every day, no less realistically—and sometimes more so—because of the unexpected deviations.
In giving attention to serious ideas, the expressions announce that humanity is predisposed to seeing life as a bottomless mystery—with everything in the mix, deviations included.
Unexpected deviations are intrinsic to life, even when rendered artfully, for instance, in the philosophical and theological writings from throughout the ages, or comically in contemporary cinema, or routinely at home with family, at work, in community.
In any era, seems the idea is the same wherever, no matter the improbable and sometimes dissonant symphony of creative and artistic and practical forms expressing an assenting "yes!" to it.
Those stimulating sounds are part of the rhythmic mix of all saints and sinners, all sisters and brothers, searching after unique ways of giving expression to life lived in the moment. Each voice reaches out uniquely, ultimately to join the synergistic mix of sounds of all lived lives, with sorrow and joy heard as a mixed blessing, having elements of cacophony and polyphony both.
Every moment of unexpected deviation, or of pain and pleasure, or of sadness and satisfaction, or of brutality and beauty, or of ruin and restoration is pointedly a key moment. Would your embrace of the forceful and fragile moments coming your way imply a certain sightless trust in the outcome? Whether yes or no, must we occasionally still have to make a confident suspension of the more intuitive wisdom that seeing is believing? Sometimes we simply don’t know and just have to trust in the mystery of ultimate truth. Period.
Hope as a moral imperative
So here, what does the truth look like? By virtue of membership in the communion of saints and sinners, all have the inalienable right to choose hope as a moral imperative. The choice to act consciously on that forever-and-a-day right leads perhaps to a life lived in everydayness more mindfully.
Now about this business earlier of naming Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, Joe Wood, Dr. King. What of it? An unusual mix surely. For us, the more important though not sole question is: Does calling up the name and memory of a departed soul help bring loved dead ones into being as much more than celebrated personalities? Do their lives, the gifts they left behind, inform and become part of the historical legacy of the here and now as well as of all living and dead saints and sinners? If yes, then all of us eventually get mixed in—with not only those Halloween revelers pictured earlier, but also with those inspiring artists and philosophers through the ages, plus we get mixed in with that not-to-be-forgotten miscellany of characters and caricatures stocking contemporary films.
That mixture crystallizes the wondrous labyrinth of humanity—the whole, intriguing kaleidoscopic array. As a real and virtual-reality assortment of saints and sinners, that mixture is a symphonic ensemble of arms-akimbo folk creating and living in the sounds and sights of everydayness. We all yearn for peace in the struggle for meaning. It'll happen that striving after mindfulness will then have its chance to be transformed naturally into a heartfelt summons, a calling to dress up in neighborly harmony and walk in the shoes of civility
Courtesy and goodwill are reminders more than at Halloween, or at any other holiday or season, of the clarion call to rebirth and renewal at all times and places—here, there, everywhere. The habitual attire is optimism and celebration. Faith and the healing ointments of hope and love and compassion are the warm, brightly colored clothes required in the dark of an autumn evening growing into cold winter.
Living mindfully in hopeful everydayness
What matter categories indeed!
Really, are not all the saints and all the sinners, unofficially or officially, subject always to unique moments of dying and rising through everydayness? Living life consciously, thoughtfully, in either gloom-of-night distress or in the sunlight of serenity, ushers in a renewed capacity in any season for the whispering wonder of morning rebirth.
Mindful actions assure a distressed community, globally and at home, that neither a Mother Teresa-like slow march to death through infirmity, nor a Princess Diana-like acceleration to disaster, can degrade the beauty of their saintly deeds and goodwill. Like both Joe Wood's and Dr. King's mindful actions before their own deaths, can our mindful lives too be an assurance to the community that dark loss and agony—the reality of pain—are eventually transformed into the light of gain and ecstasy?
As always, then, the helter skelter communion of saints and sinners, yes everyone at the resplendent feast, can be at once a secular and sacred celebration, calling each of us to our inalienable right and obligation in all seasons to dress up in the warm and bright clothes of healing hope.
Jim Boushay and Rickey Sain are trustees of Resources Unlimited Foundation, founded in 1980. The Foundation is a social justice think tank that creates and facilitates projects of civic engagement. In 1995 they co-founded the Festival of Potluck Foods. Sign at the Feast
Feast on words that nourish
Author unknown and anonymous. at the September 5, 1999, Festival of Potluck Foods
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