Essay: God's Second-Favorite Holiday

Bendee · #1 (**permalink**) 5th November 2006, 03:22 PM

Essay: God's Second-Favorite Holiday
by Steve Roberts

Halloween is God’s second-favorite holiday. That’s my story, anyway. Valentine’s Day is number one, of course, since it is a celebration of love, the impetus behind every healthy choice we make. Halloween is a celebration of the fears we must move through to make that choice. Specifically, Halloween commemorates the masks we wear because we are afraid of embracing our true self—a being of unlimited possibility.

While our kids, for a few hours on this singular day, pretend to be some variation of either ghosts, corpses, princesses, superheroes, or three-eyed blood-sucking monsters with bad hair, most of us (over the age of, say, 12) spend just about every hour of every day pretending to be…well, you name it: doctors, lawyers and Indian chiefs, Mr. Omnipotent, Ms. Responsible, the keeper of righteousness, a worthless slug, not to mention helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, loyal and thrifty—and who could forget “socially responsible”…and cool.

When I say “pretending,” I don’t mean we’re phony. We’ve just allowed ourselves to forget that the majesty of who we are is beyond any identity we can imagine. Consider how many of us approach retirement in terror at the prospect of relinquishing a worldly role to which we have become, frankly, addicted.

Another everyday example of how masks can kill is the almost universal intolerance for women to cry in the workplace. A New York Times story on the subject pointed to an incident on the television program “Apprentice: Martha Stewart.” A young woman whose team had just lost a contest confessed that she felt like crying. “Cry and your out of here,” Martha shot. “Women in business don’t cry, my dear.”

But what was Martha really saying?

My story is: “Don’t be yourself. Suppress. Deny. Separate from your feelings. Don’t trust your own experience. Never allow emotions to influence your behavior. I’m afraid of my feelings, so you can be sure I’m not making room for yours.” And so forth.

Sound familiar?

When our children act goofy and we tell them to “grow up,” how much are we really telling them to stop growing, stop changing, stop finding their own way, stop experimenting—and instead act in a manner that is comfortable for us (i.e., doesn’t frighten us)? How much are we telling them, “Kid, wear a mask.”?

On the TV drama “Grey’s Anatomy,” one of the characters, a world-class surgeon facing a potentially career-ending injury, held up his hands and said, “These are who I am.” No surprise the Buddha advised that all suffering is the result of attachment. Simone Weil put it more poetically: “The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”

I don’t know about you, but it seems that my entire life has been designed to teach me again and again that I’m not remotely whoever it is I think I am. Sure, there are things I do and roles I play, but so far as I can tell not a single one of them (not even man, American, husband, or dad) is any more me than being the maitre d’ of Cannibal Island.

My guess is the universe orchestrated Halloween to remind us to treat our many masks as children do on this delightful holiday—as play things to enjoy—and to remember what’s under them. After all, it’s not the masks themselves that are dangerous. It’s our mistaking them for the real us—a being of unlimited possibility.

Steve Roberts is the author of Cool Mind Warm Heart, a collection of essays, stories, and photographs of stone sculptures he builds on his Vermont farm. He can be found on the web at CoolMindWarmHeart.com and at TheHeartOfTheEarth.com.

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