Halloween, and Civilizing Nature

Although I cannot remember her name, I remember hearing on the radio several years ago an Asian-American woman relating her immigrant family’s first encounter with Halloween.  As they experienced it, one evening in October, an unknown child knocked at their door.  And, as best they could understand it through the language barrier, the child was wanting something sweet to eat.  Although not having made any preparations for this unexpected visitor, the family did their best to satisfy the child's seeming hunger because they knew from their own background in Asia the dangers of malnutrition and starvation.

But within the hour, another child came to the door of the family's home!  And then still another child, again asking for something to eat.  The family, having soon exhausted their supply of sweets, went to their refrigerator to get more food, but had only some pickled cucumber to give to the child, which they did.  Hearing this story, I could not help but laugh as I imagined the expression of a trick-or-treating child being given pickled cucumber instead of a Snickers bar.

This anecdote, besides providing humor, gives some insight into aspects of our human nature.  Our current-day Halloween has mostly lost any real threat that children will perform some practical joke against us (some "trick") if we do not provide a treat as requested.  The Halloween tradition has evolved into the form of giving candy to unknown children to match their preference for sweets.  And with that act of giving, we extend ourselves beyond our human tendencies to hoard for ourselves, or to share primarily with those closest to us, such as our own family.  Halloween thus embodies a suppression of some aspects of our human nature (selfishness) coupled with the encouragement of other aspects of our human nature (compassion for others).

Even in its earlier manifestation that included real tricks, Halloween embodied a channeling and civilizing of potentially troublesome aspects of human nature.  Namely, the danger of children acting out their powerlessness and frustration by destroying something adults own.  Instead of such destructiveness, on one night each year, children (if they did so anonymously) were allowed to perform practical jokes against adults, such as rubbing soap on a house's windows.  That sort of channeling of childhood powerlessness into tricks has been mostly dropped from the celebration.  The gifts of candy are now usually freely given to any child who rings the doorbell.

There is much argument today about what is our "human nature."  And the choices are often presented in terms of opposites.  This is nothing new.  Three centuries ago, Alexander Pope wrote of humans:

"Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,...

He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;"

It does not require much reflection to realize we have sometimes unjustly indicted animals ("beasts") for seeming faults that we possess as humans.  Nevertheless, Pope's point about the tension within our human natures still stands.  On Halloween night, some children do play the role of the "beast" within them by costuming themselves as monsters. And we adults aim to act out the more generous nature within us by giving candy.

Maybe there also lies waiting at the heart of Halloween a deeper mystery that we might know if we could develop a reverence within ourselves.  That reverence would be woven through with humility, because it would be the act of adults (with all their powers) leaning down to children in an act of giving.  The result could be an experience of self-transcendence.  A century ago, the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore captured the wonder of such a loving act in one of what he called his "song offerings."

Rabindranath Tagore

"When I bring sweet things to your greedy hands,
 I know why there is honey in the cup of the flower
 and why fruits are secretly filled with sweet juice -- 

when I bring sweet things to your greedy hands....

When I bring to you coloured toys, my child,
 I understand why there is such a play of colours on clouds,
 on water, and why flowers are painted in tints -- 

when I give coloured toys to you, my child."

~ ~ ~

(How do you think we might nurture the human qualities Tagore expresses, even if we do not have children of our own?)

(The Pope quotation is from Essay on Man, II, 1.)

(The Tagore quotation is from his book Gitanjali, © 1913, no. 62.)

(All the photos are in the Public Domain.)