Memento Mori

Remember you must die.

I led a book discussion group at my church for a few years and one of our fall sessions was themed: "Teach us to Count our Days." The morbid awareness that we are all gonna die someday gives us the ability to appreciate life today even more, or so some people think. We read a humorous novel about a group of elderly friends going to funeral after funeral called Memento Mori , and a book written by an undertaker called The Undertaking, a bunch of essays about death and burial. A few months ago, I read a book that would have fit perfectly into this theme, called Stiff.

I grew up in a family that did not observe Halloween. Some years we were allowed to hand out candy at our own front door, one year we dressed up our little sister as a witch and used her as a front to get ourselves some candy from the neighbors (she was too little to know she was breaking the rules, and we older two could argue that we were not technically trick-or-treating). One year a sign was posted on our front door that chided any trick-or-treaters that came up our front walk: 'This house does not participate in the pagan observance of Halloween.' My first real full-on Halloween costume was my sophomore year in college, I went to a party as Pippi Longstocking, with Kool-Aid red hair braided and sticking up with coat hanger support.

Last year I gently thumbed my nose at the no-Halloween observance rule of my high school by giving a Reformation Day speech in chapel in monkish costume as Tetzel, that priest infamous for selling indulgences in such a way to get Martin Luther fired up about reforming the Church.

I prefer classy pumpkins and mums and "fall harvest" decor to blow up jack-o-lanterns and mummies for my fall yard look, but this year on Halloween day I poured a bunch of styrofoam human bones on our front park bench. Two years ago I let Steve and his friends set up a gruesome scene of a partially buried person in my front lawn. What is going on with me?

I think Halloween is a holiday a Christian can observe without embarrassment or a sense of double standard. Memento Mori means "reminder of death" and that is what I think Halloween has become. We don't see dead and dying people very often, and yet for a few weeks we are surrounded with skeletons, graveyards, and other sights that remind us of something everyone has some level of dread for: the eventual time of our own death and bodily decay.

As a Christian, I believe that part of the curse that came upon the human race in Eden is that Death has cast a shadow of fear and scariness over life and it is no help at all to pretend otherwise. Halloween is good at reminding us all that we humans are collectively afraid of monsters, zombies, ghosts, demons, vampires, graveyards, spiders, blood-soaked weapons. But I also believe that the good news of Jesus' resurrection allows us to stick our tongue out at death and poke fun of it in a way that Halloween has given us permission to do.

I'm not going to insist that Halloween is little more than a fun day to put kids in a cute puppy costume and take pictures and let them collect candy. One look at the costume selection for kids and adults at Party City is proof enough--Halloween gets to the heart of it all: sex and death. Ninja warrior. Sexy nurse. Vampire bride. Blood. Fake gory body parts.

I'm not going to ignore all the ghoul. I'm going to keep learning what my neighbors are afraid of by appreciating what is set out on their lawn, tacky or gruesome. I'm going to admit that I'm afraid of these things too. I'm going to look Death in the eye, and cringe a bit, because it will keel me over some day. But then I'm also going to stick my tongue out at it, cavort around the neighborhood with my kids in costumes, and show up in church next Easter to keep hearing the good news that takes us beyond Halloween existence: Death is keeled over too, not by the reproductive juices of Hot Sexy Nurse or the brave exploits of Super Hero Ninja Warrior, but by a place that was first revealed to fearful women like me: the empty tomb of Jesus Christ.