The Gospel According to Stranger Things: Thin Places and All Saints Day

Recently the wildly popular podcast This American Life ran a fascinating story about a unique phone booth in Japan.

The story takes place in a little town called Otsuchi that was devastated by the 2011 Tsunami.

Before the Tsunami hit, an older man named Itaru Sasaki had installed a disconnected phone booth overlooking the Pacific ocean as a way of helping him cope with the death of a family member. He would go into the booth and “talk” to his deceased relative.

It was non-functioning phone that technically didn’t do anything. but for Sasaki it helped him somehow deal with his loss.

A Haunted World

But after the Tsunami hit, and the people of Japan experienced the kind of profound tragedy that comes when a country loses thousands and thousands of people in a mere moment, the word of Sasaki’s Wind phone began to spread.

And people from all over the nation began to make a kind of pilgrimage to his little phone booth looking out over a cliff so that they too, could talk to their beloved dead.

And that’s where NPR’s talented crew picks up the story.

A Japanese documentary asked Sasaki if they could record (from a distance) the conversations that people were having with their loved ones.

It’s an incredibly heartbreaking scene, hearing people sob into a disconnected telephone about how lonely they are, or how they don’t know how they can live another day without them.

It’s easy, as someone who didn’t lose a loved one in such a horrific catastrophe to dismiss these phone calls as some kind of silly superstition, but I believe to do so is to shrink back from owning our own deepest hopes and desires.

The NPR reporter who did the This American Life piece laid the context for this phenomenon by reminding us:

“The idea of keeping up a relationship with the dead is not such a strange one in Japan. The line between our world and their world is thin.

The Celtic Christians introduced us long ago to the idea that life is filled with thin spaces like this. Where the line between heaven and earth, death and life is profoundly thin.

As a pastor, I’ve been called into some great moments of pain and despair. I’ve walked alongside parents burying their young children and been in the rooms where spouses watched their partner die after sharing decades of life together.

And so those phone calls from the coast of Japan sounded eerily close to home. Because what do you do in the face of profound loss like this? How do you say goodbye to someone you love so much? And what do you do with this strange sense that you have that they might not be completely gone?

So I’m going through a series interacting with Netflix great new show “Stranger Things” and why I think that it was such a huge success among both critics and viewers.

I’m also a Christian, and tomorrow is one one of the holiest seasons of the Christian calendar. All Saints Day

The Church calendar has for over a thousand years insisted that we don’t forget the people who have died, the saints who have gone before us. It has insisted that we both don’t gloss over death, or give death more power than it is due. It calls us to remember the lives of those who have died, and acknowledge that in some mysterious way they are with God, and we will be with them again.

So during this season, all over the world, Christians take flowers to tombs, clean graves, tell stories about their departed family and friends, and for a short season they allow the absences that haunt them to come into focus.

The Church calls this season “Hallow Tide” as if the material world is being washed in the hallowed, unknown mystery of the age to come.

Or as it’s called in Stranger Things:

The Upside Down

Without giving too much away, in one of the early episodes, one of the main characters (a young boy) has been abducted. Police presume that he’s dead and claim to have recovered his body. But the boy’s mother refuses to believe that he’s gone. In fact, she develops an elaborate way to communicate to her missing boy that involves blinking Christmas lights.

When you are first watching this part of the season, you assume that her son is dead and that she’s just having some kind of mental breakdown. But as the season progresses you begin to realize she’s not crazy, she really is receiving what those people in the phone booth in Japan are desperately listening for…some kind of signal from their loved ones that they are there and with them.

This is, I think something that the world is hungry for, it’s why we lean in when those Christmas lights start blinking, or tear up when we listen to the desperate pleads for a reunion with a loved one coming from that Windphone in Japan.

Our deepest intuitions are that the world is haunted, and some days we stumble upon thin spaces that don’t make sense, but cannot be ignored.

This isn’t limited to the Christian tradition, or even people of faith. In fact, another Patheos blogger, who writes for the Patheos Atheist channel wrote this about that same This American Life episode:

the real value from this segment comes from its poignant illustration of why rationality will never be a completely sufficient replacement for ritual and irrational beliefs. Just to be clear: I’m an atheist and an advocate for rationality, science, and critical thinking as the most useful (and too frequently ignored) tools of human civilization. But despite that, when listening to this segment it is impossible to ignore just how much power a simple disconnected phone line is providing to people who are suffering terribly and how it manages to help them process their grief precisely because of the unconventional, irrational scenario that it represents.

Protestant Christians often give Catholics a hard time for their belief in praying to the saints, and I understand the pitfalls that they are guarding against, but what if we reframed this ancient idea in more of the way it was originally intended.

Not so much praying to a deceased Christian as praying with them.

Recognizing that they haven’t stopped existing but are now with God.

Halloween and All Saints Day are more than just remembering death, or even remembering the dead. It’s a way of remembering the Christian Hope, that God has not abandoned us or the ones we love. The saints departed are with God, and in some strange way still with us. It’s a way we remember that the world is haunted with the saints of God.

We really do live in a haunted world, filled with thin places and stranger things.