Decorations are up, and thousands of candy bars have been purchased. Porch lights will soon be on, and kiddos will pour into the streets for a trick or a treat. Halloween is upon us!
As we celebrate the Eve of All Saints and prepare our costumes for the weekend’s festivities, I’m struck by a spiritual reality underneath the fun.
We dress up in fun and festivity every Halloween, calling to mind characters, personalities and even saints and holy individuals. Dressing up like characters is fun, and emulating saints is good. But, on the other 364 days of the year, do we keep our figurative costumes on? Not the flimsy fabric of Halloween, I mean, but the disguises and masks that allow us to hide the flaws of our hearts.
It’s understandable to want to hide our sinfulness, shame, faults, failings and weaknesses–who wants to spend time thinking, much less talking, about those?
It’s all too easy to put on a mask before the Lord, pretending to have it all together, to be perfect, holy or whatever we think we should be.
But the Lord wants to love you and me as we are, as he’s created us to be.
In his book, Interior Freedom, Father Jacques Philippe beautifully reflects on the love of God for us as actual persons. He writes:
“The person God loves with the tenderness of a Father, the person he wants to touch and to transform with his love, is not the person we’d have liked to be or ought to be. It’s the person we are. God doesn’t love ‘ideal persons’ or ‘virtual beings.’ He loves actual, real people. He is not interested in saintly figures in stained glass windows but in us sinners.”
When we put on disguises, masks or costumes before the Lord, we obscure ourselves, making it more difficult for God to speak into our lives with his love, mercy, healing and compassion. We distance ourselves from him by ignoring the very areas into which he most wants to enter.
But the Good News of the Gospel is the good news of Emmanuel, God-with-us. God loves us so intensely that he became one of us, that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, that he becomes bread for our sake in the Eucharist daily.
God longs to be close to each one of us, to know us intimately as we are so that he can love and encourage, challenge and exhort us to become ever more who we are, to become the people he is calling us to be, to become alter Christi, other Christs in the world.
In that vein, while in Denver for World Youth Day in 1993, Pope St. John Paul II powerfully exhorted attendees to “become who you are!”
“Young people of America, World Youth Day challenges you to be fully conscious of who you are as God’s dearly beloved sons and daughters,” he said.
Becoming truly ourselves is integrally tied to our identities as sons and daughters of the Father. From that identity flows everything else; with that identity and through baptism, you and I are established as priests, prophets, kings and queens.
When we let down our masks, costumes and disguises, we open ourselves up to receive that heavenly inheritance and become ever more who we are as daughters and sons of the Father.
This Hallowtide, may you and I become ever more who we are. May we become the saints God has called to be his hands and feet in the modern world. May we become ever more joyfully countercultural witnesses to the truth, beauty and goodness of the Gospel.
All you holy men and women, saints of God, pray for us!
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