Halloween? No thanks.

It was Halloween last night and, for once, we enjoyed a quiet evening. No rings of the doorbell at all. The chocolates on the shelf by the front door remained unclaimed.

I can’t say I’m sorry. To be honest I find the whole thing a bit sickening. Why would anybody in their right mind – especially a Christian – want to encourage a fixation with horror, ghosts, werewolves, witches, vampires, skulls and corpses? It is all thoroughly unhealthy. Yes, I know that for many kids it’s just a chance to dress up and collect a few goodies from the neighbours. But it’s potentially the thin end of the wedge, to be followed for some by more serious involvement in the occult, obsession and petrifying fear.

The commercial aspect stinks, too. In my childhood nobody had ever heard of Halloween. It was always bigger in America, of course, and in time British companies realised that here was another chance to make an annual killing. Today the supermarkets are laden with ghoulish costumes and other spooky haberdashery. Whole farms have gone over to pumpkin production.

The BBC couldn’t miss out either. On 31st October the TV featured news items on the rise of paganism and showed footage of modern-day witches prancing about in fields wearing cloaks, muttering to the spirits of the trees and talking about the spells they make each morning to protect their children when they send them off to school.

All this stuff lies at the opposite extreme from the glorious truth that has come to us in Jesus Christ. He is light, and life, and love. He is a million miles from the dark and scary stuff that forms the core of Halloween. Never the twain should meet. I’d like to see Halloween fizzle out completely.

But in the meantime it’s likely to be around for some time. So I suppose we’ll continue to have the chocolates handy, and we’ll hand them out with a cheerful word – and a prayer that God will bless the kids on the doorstep.

Best bliss

Hymns sung in my childhood and youth regularly come back to me. I usually sang them then with little appreciation of their depth and insight, but now, in my relative old age, I see them for the gems they are. I love to take them out, polish them up and admire their beauty afresh.

Here’s the latest treasure to get this treatment:

Jesus, thou joy of loving hearts,
Thou fount of life, thou light of men,
From the best bliss that earth imparts
We turn unfilled to thee again.

It’s that last couplet that gets me. How true it is!

I’ve been blessed with a good life and have enjoyed many moments of blissful joy and contentment. That’s right and proper—the Lord is the giver of ‘every good and perfect gift’ and he has given us ‘all things richly to enjoy’. But deep down I know full well that only Jesus himself truly satisfies.

So, ‘from the best bliss that earth imparts’ I find myself resetting my bearings to ‘turn unfilled’ once more to him.

Naïve–again!

‘Three score years and ten.’ Yes, I’ve recently had my 70th birthday. It’s a good time, I reckon, for assessing my life, my values and my intentions.

Doing so, I find myself coming back to the statement in Hebrews 11:6 that ‘Anyone who comes to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.’ That’s where I continue to take my stand, with deep satisfaction.

The theologian Paul Ricoeur wrote about a phase of the Christian life that he called the ‘second naivety’. When you first become a Christian you are pretty naïve, taking everything you are taught at face value. Then, with the passing of time and the receiving of a few knocks, you begin to look at matters of faith, doctrine and practice more intently and have to cope with the troublesome doubts that sometimes arise. But as you stick in there you come out of the storms and, in spite of still not understanding everything or resolving all the tricky issues, sail into the calm waters of a ‘second naivety’ where simple faith in our loving God rules supreme over every aspect of life.

This, I can testify, is a good place to be, and I plan to cruise around in these waters for the rest of my days, be they few or many.

‘Train up a child…’

A friend in the USA emailed me about Proverbs 22:6 – ‘Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.’

He wrote, ‘Could you give me some pointers as to your thinking on this issue. In the heart of ‘evangelical America’ people seem to be using this text as some kind of all-embracing get-out clause, for what they may or may not have done as Christian parents, and it makes me uncomfortable – and I’m not sure why.’

Here’s what I replied:

‘I’ve generally gone along with the traditional interpretation, which is that if parents build the right values and practices into their children from an early age, those children are likely to adhere to them even when they reach adulthood.

‘That seems to be what the verse fundamentally means. The Jesuits understood this and said something along the lines of ‘Give us a child until he is six, and he’ll be a Catholic for life.’

‘A friend of mine had an angle on it that was a bit different. He said it meant that parents should suss out early on what a child’s natural bent is, in terms of gifts and strengths, and encourage him along that path, then when he is older he will be able to exploit it to its fullest potential. There’s wisdom in that in its own right, of course, though I have to say I think it’s reading into this text something that is probably not there. Note, however, that ‘in the way he should go’ is literally, ‘according to his way’, and that’s what gave my friend his starting point.

‘Whatever line we take, the important thing is to recognise that proverbs like this are not promises or guarantees from God but simply wise observations about life that tend to be generally – but not universally – true. They provide, at best, very loose guidance. Probably a majority of children from sound Christian homes either decide to follow Christ for themselves in due course, or at least live by broadly Christian standards even if they stop short of personal belief. But there are exceptions at both ends of the scale. You and I both, I’m sure, know parents who were hopeless by any standards and their kids have turned out to be models of Christian virtue and stability, and others who seemed to be first-class parents but their kids kicked over the traces and, in adulthood, had little or no time for Christ. Ultimately, salvation (and the way of life associated with it) are ‘not of blood’. So Prov 22:6 shows a helpful part of the picture, but not the whole of it by any means.’