Thesis: Christians who get squeamish about Halloween are suffering from too much Clear religion. (This thought inspired by this post, via Fr. Edward Green, which, although it doesn’t reject Halloween, is certainly guilty of a squeamish fastidiousness.) (You have no idea the satisfaction it gives me to say that about a blog associated with Mark Driscoll.)
The notion of Clear religion comes from C.S. Lewis (God in the Dock):
We may salva reverentia divide religions, as we do soups, into “thick” and “clear”. By Thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of Thick religions. By Clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are Clear religions. Now if there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly. And the only two religions that fulfil this condition are Hinduism and Christianity. But Hinduism fulfils it imperfectly. The Clear religion of the Brahmin hermit in the jungle and the Thick religion of the neighbouring temple go on side by side. The Brahmin hermit doesn’t bother about the temple prostitution nor the worshipper in the temple about the hermit’s metaphysics. But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be Clear: I have to be Thick. That is how one knows one has come to the real religion.
I have no idea whether he’d pass a Comparative Religions class with that comment, but it makes a useful distinction.
This is a subject that sets several thoughts swirling in my head. Someday I’ll take time to pluck them down and set them in order. For the moment I only want to place myself on the side of Thick, semi-pagan Christianity, and against Clear, over-rationalized Christianity. I understand that Lewis said both must be kept in balance - but I think some jumping up and down on the Thick side of the scale is needed today.
Over Hallowtide we are given the opportunity to thicken our ideas about the communion of the saints. We can experience some of the mysterium tremendum associated with death and the supernatural. We can pray for the dead. We can remember that this season represents something fundamental to humanity’s religious feeling - something that has followed us up out of paganism.
As I said, these are all half-formed thoughts. I just thought today was a good day for air out a couple of them. I’ll leave you with this from Rod Dreher (be sure to read both his post and the posts he links):
I must confess that the older I get, the more I believe that the kind of lurid Christianity — weeping icons, gaudy statues, bloody plaster Christs drooping from crucifixes, candles inside cheap, colored glass sheaths bought at the supermercado — is closer to the Real Thing than the abstractions of the theologians.
