It’s about time!
Can you believe it is “All Hallows Eve” or slurred into one single word: “Halloween.” Tonight many, little ones (or those choosing to be little) will playfully or seriously deal with “…the ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night…”
For me, this night marks the end of summer and easy-autumn. Now I start thinking about all the “stuff” that happens between this moment and the end of the year: Thanksgiving, traveling, and Christmas shopping and pageants and concerts and gatherings and liturgies, and yeah, planning parish budget and the parish annual meeting that occurs 35 days after Christmas, and the parochial report due 66 days after Christmas.
So much will happen so rapidly. And off we shall run and force ourselves to enjoy ourselves when some are wistful and sad, others are harried and frenzied. Some take offense at any religious significance to a religious feast, and others retaliate and wish only evil on those who share not their own view of the meaning of the days.
We’ll talk and we’ll race about and we’ll dine – at least some of us will. Others living in the shadows will watch from afar. With all this rushing, I force myself to remember that Jesus not only redeemed persons – our “souls” to use the vocabulary of perennial theology – but he also redeemed time! If it is true that all of existence was caught up in the redemptive self-gift of Christ, then that includes “time” itself. So this means I need to be thinking about “time.” How do I use it? How do I abuse it? How am I its prisoner? Does it allow me to enjoy my life or am I forever hastening to the next stop, the next thing, the next meeting, the next meal, and over and over and over because I have not mastered time.
I don’t know all (maybe not any) of the answers. But I know this: we don’t need to create “ghoulies and ghosties And long-leggedy beasties” to frighten us. We make time itself the demon that terrifies us.
Fr. Joe