Screaming at Halloween is nothing
in comparison to real screams in life.
Watch our Truth in Two (full text included) to find out what should make us afraid.
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Picture Credit: Josh Collingwood, Snappy Goat
FULL TEXT
Driving down the highways of Indianapolis, billboards advertise Halloween scream-fests. For those attracted to horror, being scared in haunted houses or cornfields is a thrill. But more often than not, October prompts me to remember The Silent Scream by Edvard Munch. Munch’s painting is of a sexless, twisted, fetal-faced creature, with mouth and eyes open wide in a shriek of horror. Munch re-created a vision that had seized him as he walked one evening in his youth with two friends at sunset. As he later described it,
“The air turned to blood and the faces of my comrades became a garish yellow-white.”
He heard vibrating in his ears
“a huge endless scream coursed through nature.”
Edvard was torn. His dad had just died. He lacked his father’s faith in God. Reflecting later on his bohemian friends and their embrace of free love, he wrote:
“God and everything was overthrown; everyone was raging in a wild, deranged dance of life. But I could not set myself free from my fear of this life and eternal life.”
If Christians are to have an answer for Munch or scream-fests at Halloween, our beliefs, our theology, must be anything but dry, dusty, and boring. Theology is lived every moment of every day, whether we think so or not, whether we like it or not. Living theology—incarnational theology, if you will—is no spectator sport. We humans are not in the stands rooting on the home team. No, we are in the trenches, sweat-drenched, foul-odored, trying to get traction on the turf of life, so we can run the next play. The intersection of theology and practice is where we should live.
The Halloween season reminds us that many scream, not from the fun of jump scares, but the everyday life of Munch’s silent scream.
My Truth in Two series during Fall 2022 is a tribute to our son Tyler Micah. We lament his death while desiring to give voice to all who suffer in any way.
[This material is drawn from a sermon I preached on Job 3 at Zionsville Fellowship (Indiana) the spring of 2008. A number of articles have used the same words and ideas since and can be found by searching for “lament” at MarkEckel.com where you can also find a tribute to my son.]