There are times when I sense we are entering a new Dark Age, for the signs speak for themselves – the rise of tyranny, lies, and prosecutions of the innocent, terror attacks instilling fear and horror, demanding war as self-defense. Evil masquerades as good, lies are said to be true, and children are maimed by school authorities. These are dark times.
Hope seems to spiral into despair.
And then there is God, as my good Bishop Morse of blessed memory often said. In the deepest darkest places God finds us, takes our hand, lifts us up to see the light, His light. He made it. He made us.
And then there is today, the Feast of Christ the King, a celebration of the victory of life over death, light over darkness. We celebrate the Lamb of God who becomes Christ the King on his throne in glory. We celebrate this victory that outshines all defeats, all darkness. We look to Him to quell the demons of fear that maim and butcher the innocent. We look to Him to pull us from the precipice and bring us home on His shoulders, to cure our blindness and heal our deafness and give voice to the humble and meek. Only Christ the King can redeem our world of death and darkness.
We are entering a season of long nights and lessening light, approaching the end of October. It is a time that masquerades, costumed as something it is not, on All Hallows Eve, Halloween. Once a children’s time to dress in costumes and play pretend and knock on friendly doors and collect candy, this ritual has become grisly and morbid, one often not suited for young children. I noticed the change in the ‘fifties, when local boys decided it would be fun to stream toilet paper over our neighbor’s tree. Normally we would call this vandalism and trespassing, but on Halloween it was allowed. At age ten, I considered it rather scary and was leery after that about trick-or-treating in the dark in our neighborhood. The tricks didn’t seem worth the treats.
Christians, of course, celebrate The Feast of All Saints the following day. The day after All Saints, we remember in prayer All Souls, giving our pastors lists of family and friends who have entered Heaven, to be remembered in the Church’s prayers. And so the darkness of Halloween is enlightened with the hope of Heaven, the promise of Eternity with our God of Love. In a sense, and certainly true historically, All Hallows Eve, meaning the evening before All Saints, was a corruption of the true holy-day, as if Lucifer needed to muddy the joy of the saints with death and darkness the night before.
When my son was young, in the ‘eighties, this strange cult of death was even more obvious. Fairy tale costumes portraying virtuous heroes of the past had been replaced with goblins and ghouls, skeletons and werewolves, monsters of hell rising from the earth, that portrayed vices and viciousness, maiming and cruelty. I was grateful that my son went out as a baker one year, and a ghost another year, and a robot when he was seven, R2-D2 from Star Wars. I was a single parent at the time with little to spend on costumes so we manufactured one out of grocery bags and tin foil, but when I heard someone say from the doorway as he offered candy to my son, “Ah, how clever, a Safeway bag!” I worried about my son’s reaction. But he was mainly interested in the candy and was eager to visit as many houses as possible (supervised from the street by his mother).
Today, our Anglican Province of Christ the King celebrates their patronal festival. In this world, we hold on to our King, grateful to have preserved the Episcopate, the line of bishops going back to St. John the Evangelist in the first century, the apostle of love. Some of us were in Denver on January 28, 1978 (our good Dean Napier carried the Christ the King banner) and witnessed the consecration of Robert Sherwood Morse to preserve this episcopacy through the centuries. From there our band of truth-tellers welcomed others, so that matters of faith and practice could continue unbroken. These matters were credal ones, issues of belief in key doctrines, or truths, but the one that cannot be denied is the Resurrection of Our Lord, for all else depends on this. Once you believe in the resurrection (and there is plenty of evidence to believe), you have to ask, what does this mean to me, that the Son of God came to earth to love me so? You have to ask, how will I live my life now that I have come to see so clearly? The Resurrection changes everything.
And so in our little chapel in Berkeley, I gave thanks for the love and light of Christ the King, and when the Gospel was sung by our good priest, sunlight shafted through the high windows, enshrining the chancel. It was a vision of love, of knowing, of seeing the truth of Christ, that goodness conquers evil, love conquers hate, and the victory is ours in the precious name of Our Lord Jesus.
All we need to do is believe. It changes everything.
Christine Sunderland
Christine Sunderland 