Costumes and Candy Corn

Today is October 31st. If I were in the States, I’d probably go to a costume party wearing some sort of clever outfit and eat way more candy corn than is healthy for any one person to eat in the course of a decade. Last year, for example, I dressed up as a Republican who’d been badly beaten up by an angry electorate and ate probably three pounds of the white-yellow-orange card-board tasting pyramidal treats. I had a grand time celebrating with folks dressed up as ghouls and even went on a tour of haunted houses in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. As a child, Halloween candy was an important part of my autumn diet and someday I’ll probably take my own kids trick-or-treating, too. I think it can be a healthy, human, and good thing to confront the realities of death with a sense of humor and a touch of spook. For the Christian believer, after all, the grave will never win any permanent victory nor will death have any lasting sting.

Here in Paraguay, though, Halloween is different. Christian believers take the holiday as a time of very real spiritual danger. This past month, the pastors at church have been preparing us all for October 31st, a day on which they believe satanic forces are much more at work than the rest of the year. In the school and church, October was proclaimed a month of spiritual warfare and the Devil’s forces were battled with much prayer and fasting, for some kinds of demons “cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting.”

Thus, I won’t be celebrating anything related to Halloween this year. I’ve hung up my ideas for clever costumes in the closet of my mind for another place and time, and I’ve even shied away from glancing at the candy corn displays in the supermarket. And what’s all this for?

The rational part of me wants to say that the Paraguayan church is superstitious, believing in ghosts and spiritual forces that the rest of the modern world has given-up on. How many people do I know, for example, who have been demon-possessed in the U.S.? I definitely heard of one person once, but even then my skeptical mind attributed her demons to mental illnesses and her exorcism to an act of social readjustment.

Yet here, people do believe in satanic forces and demon possession and evil powers and they do believe in it strongly. Many from the church, for example, have told me of ritualistic demonic sacrifices on Cerro Lamabare, the same hill just a few miles away where we were mugged just a week ago. Other believers have told me of extended family members who have made pacts with Bombero, an ancient demon firmly established in pre-Christian mythology and the Paraguayan mind. At a funeral vigil I attended last week, there was a cup of water placed under the coffin to ward away evil spirits. For better or worse, the Paraguayan people and the church here have strong beliefs in the world of spirits.

This Halloween, I’m giving up my so-called reason and American point-of-view and embracing the attitude of Paraguayan believers. The belief in invisible spiritual powers is, after all, thoroughly Christian and biblical. I want to believe in spiritual realities, both good and bad that I cannot see, because I know scripture teaches so much about “cosmic powers” and “spiritual forces.” Our own Lord Jesus Christ cast out evil demons while on earth, and is now seated in Heaven with all “angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.” When Jesus Christ himself saw and understood spiritual forces and is described as the Lord and ruler over every one, it would require no small amount of hubris on my part to claim that, intellectually, I’ve moved beyond a belief in other-worldly powers. Oftentimes my faulty reason is a hindrance to true biblical and Christian faith and too often I quickly abandon very important aspects of belief in favor of a modern, rational interpretation.

Hence, this Halloween I’m trying to give up some of that prideful and wrong thinking. I’m fasting from Halloween candy and costumes and praying for God’s protection over the church. I’m paying closer attention to what my brothers and sisters in Christ say about spiritual realities and truths, and doing my best to leave my unchristian modernist ideas at home in America. I’m slowly learning about things I cannot see and doing my best not to jump to conclusions. While I think I may be starving for lack of candy corn, I trust that the harvest of faith I reap in its place will be longer-lasting and more satisfying anyways.