Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian
From: nlt@lear.cs.duke.edu (N. L. Tinkham)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Halloween
Message-ID: 
Date: 3 Oct 89 00:33:50 GMT
Organization: Duke University CS Dept.; Durham, NC
Lines: 61
Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu

Our Fearless Moderator writes:

> Why are "ghost stories" around a campfire still attractive?  For me at least
> they provide a little opening in a world that otherwise has all too little
> room for anything mysterious or beyond the ordinary.  Certainly one
> would not want to do this in a way that promotes superstition, but I
> worry about completely ridding the world of all fairy tales, ghost
> stories, halloween, etc.


     This calls to mind a piece of my own story.

     As a college student, I invested most of my classroom time in studying
mathematics and theology -- a natural choice for a young Christian with a
logic-oriented temperament, but deadly to the maintenance of religious
certainty, and by the end of those years I was engaged in trying to rebuild
some sort of religious faith that could stand up for more than five minutes
without toppling.  Having asked "Is there any way to be certain of the
existence of God" and answered the question negatively, I went on to ask
"Do I have any reason at all to believe in God?"

     There is a part of me that is very secular by nature, a part that is,
in practice, an atheist, or at best a deist.  If I am asked why the recent
hurricane hit Charlotte but not Durham, or why so-and-so is schizophrenic,
or why one person is richer than another, or any number of other day-to-day
"why" questions, I will look for a naturalistic explanation; I may end up
saying "I don't know," but I do not seriously consider explanations involving
God or other spirits -- to recall the infamous quote, "I have no need of
that hypothesis."  This secular part of me is, of course, strengthened by
our culture and a good scientific education.  My Christian upbringing offered
little challenge to this secularity, as I was raised in a tradition that -- for
good historical reasons -- was concerned to avoid all magic and superstition;
in this endeavour they were quite successful.

     But in my searching, and prompted by reading one of G. K. Chesterton's
books, I found within me something else, a part of me that has always been
fascinated by stories of ghosts and elves and trolls and tree-spirits and
water-spirits, that feels more "alive" in that world than almost anywhere
else.  And in that I found a reason not to be an atheist -- at least, a reason
not to give up looking for God:  If I am that drawn to this magical world, and
if other people through the centuries have been too, and if they have stories
to tell, maybe there's Something there.  Maybe there is Something sacred and
mysterious and "other" that touches the world, and people see it sometimes,
and some of them tell stories about legendary beings to try to talk about this
mystery.  Maybe God is like this Something (Wow!  God is like *that*?), or
maybe this Something is God, just described badly.

     "Ghost stories" and other mythology have thus been for me -- and continue
to be -- an important window into the mysterious and sacred.  It is a little
strange to find my Christian faith in such debt to pagan belief (and I know
better than to say *that* out loud in church! :-) ), but these myths preserved
for me the hope that there is Something rather than nothing -- a considerable
accomplishment in modern times, and one for which I am grateful to the
storytellers.


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"The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens.    Nancy Tinkham
 It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into    nlt@cs.duke.edu
 his head.  And it is his head that splits." -- G.K.C.   rutgers!mcnc!duke!nlt