Don’t
tell anybody, but when I walk with my children through the old Speedway
neighborhood on Halloween I’m as frightened as any child over two years of age.
I suspect this discomfort stems from my
own childhood. Most of my Hoosier school
friends grew up laughing at the local celebrity, Sammy Terry, who introduced horror
movies on a local channel in the 1970’s. He scared me out of my wits. While my friends giggled at modest fright, I
suffered from nightmares. They tried to
reassure me that the fanciful supernatural elements in these movies “were not
real,” but I knew the horror genre traded on fears which were all too realistic.
So, for twenty years I’ve hidden this
discomfort, dressed the kids up in their costumes, and went into the neighborhood
trying to play in the face of death.
There was only one year nobody took kids “trick or treating.” In 2001 when the threat of mass terrorism was
still only a month old, nobody came to my church’s long-planned Festival of Light. Horror was too real
for the community to feel safe playing around with matters of life and death. At
that time my old horror movie fears seemed well-founded.
Given all the cultural
instability, I’m thankful my children can still go “trick or treating.” I’m really
touched by the amount of trust which still exists in the American Midwest. It takes a bit of good feeling to let your kids
go door to door and eat hundreds of neighbors’ stuff.
My
neighborhood still does this despite our modest fears. As much as we want to
protect our families, we know that ultimately we have to place them in God’s
hands. While we may want to make our
world moderately safer, we know we will seldom agree on how to do that. We know ultimately the only fully safe place
in the world is in the center of the will of God. Only He has the power to swallow up death. He is a refuge from the horrors of societal
breakdown. The fear of God is the only
thing that will save us from the fear of one another.
