Every October 31st begins the cycle of the annual holiday seasons in which writers reach into the inner basement of their imaginations trying to conjure up some new ideas to write about the big celebrations being celebrated or that will be celebrated across the land by everybody and their neighbor. Starting with Halloween and then Thanksgiving and finally with Christmas, bloggers have an opportunity to engage the major holidays with words. For us Catholics I’ll stick in All Saints Day as one of the important days we try to write about. Every year bloggers try to reinvent the holiday writing wheel. We racked our brains last year to come up with something original and cool. Now we got to do it again.
Cause Halloween is an opportunity for Creative Blogging. Whether this post is creative enough or not, I’ll leave it for you to decide. I wrote this in less than an hour, so I did my best. I wrote a Halloween post for the past 3 years so I couldn’t stop the tradition.
As writers we should embrace writing about Halloween the way Charlie Brown has done with all the holidays. He has a holiday special for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. We as Catholic writers should embrace each holiday just as creatively.
The Catholic imagination makes the campy, crude schlock of Halloween depict something vital in the reenactment of salvation history. Even though it evokes fallen nature and fallen creation, it can be informed by the liturgical rhythms of man’s deliverance from Hell. Linked to All Saints and All Souls, Halloween presents an illustration of the human passage and the consequence of Christ. Without the victory over death, there would be no saints in Heaven or souls in Purgatory. Without Christ, man would have no right to ridicule the devil. Halloween offers a comic, cultural expression of the truths that comprise man’s partaking in Christ’s Resurrection. That’s what Halloween celebrates, and that’s what we should tell our kids. Trick or treat.What Do You Tell Your Kids About Halloween? (October 29, 2022) Crisis Magazine
Here is this thought fleshed out a little more.
Halloween is also a time for fun and reflection of past halloweens.
And a time for new writing if you can figure out something new. But seeing I’m pressed for time and a blank mind here is my original recycled contribution to this post I put together in less then an hour before I had to leave for work is this small thing I wrote a few years ago and now re-tweeked.
I Wanna Be A Ghost
Two more words never mentioned in the CNN article were prayer and purgatory. What if the loved ones are in purgatory and need prayers? St. Pio of Pietrelcina often reported that souls in purgatory would appear and ask him for prayers. Catholics pray for our dead in the event they are in purgatory, being purged of their sins since nothing unclean can enter heaven (Revelation 21:27).
One of my all time favorite films is the supernatural comedy Beetlejuice. In the movie a recently deceased couple interact with a goth girl played by Wynona Ryder and her family. The couple played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis decide to hire the bio-exorcist Beetlejuice played in grand comedic fashion by Michael Keaton to oust them from the house where they are destined to stay at for the next century. At one point they try to do this themselves. They end up possessing the family living there and making them sing Harry Belafonte’s Day-O while prancing and dancing around the room during dinner.
When I die, I hope that I can come back as a ghost and interact with people. Not to haunt and possess others but to give comfort, guidance,metaphysical hugs and to ask for prayers. I sense the need to be purged of my attachments to this world. I think this might be hypercritical of me to want to be a ghost. When my wife was in rehab a few weeks ago I was somehow afraid the supernatural might show up and communicate with me in the middle of the night scaring the crap out of me. If it can happen to others like in the article cited above, then why not me? When I was in college I remember being scared the Virgin Mary might decide to manifest herself to me as I rode my bike down a dark road from my friend’s house back to the school.
Macbeth Seeing the Ghost of Banquo by Théodore Chassériau Public Domain
But yet I wouldn’t mind interacting with some people in their dreams. Maybe I could. If God lets me. This dead border control agent did as described on Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. If you think about it, the kid in the Sixth Sense who could see dead people had a good relationship with Bruce Willis character you learn is dead at the end of the film. He became comfortable and familiar with him. He gave aid and comfort to the dying. With the Catholic symbolism in the film, the souls the kid interacted with could have been from purgatory. A few weeks ago my friend Marshall went to visit a graveyard and called me up and we prayed a rosary together. Down the street from the house we only live in for the next few weeks is a graveyard that my wife and I have visited on a regular basis. The names of people long gone and forgotten about. Perhaps in purgatory and in need of our prayers. Sometimes they come back to ask for those prayers. I hope I can be one of them. I know it’s a long shot, but possessing people so they can dance around the room in a supernatural way might also be fun.
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