I noticed it last year and the year before but it has gotten worse. Entirely out of hand, gross, bizarre and down right morbid: Halloween decorations and costumes. Halloween used to be marked with a carefully carved pumpkin on their front steps. Its flickering candle fearlessly held back the darkening cold of impending winter.

These days one sees fake coffins (I think they are fake) and whole graveyards. Lawn theater. One house had six gravestones, each marked RIP, rest in peace, and the names of the folks who evidently lived in the house. Another house boasted a mechanized skeleton pulling itself out of a six foot hole, three times a minute. Whatever became of sweet little Casper the ghost or those tame if tacky plywood black cats scampering across walks?

And costumes on children? Few fairy princesses or pirates, astronauts or lions? Children dress up as bloodied monster, perverse figures from horror films. Where do our children come up with these dreadful images?

Halloween, psychologist tell us, is child's play with a serious purpose. Playing with scary things helps a child learn to manage the anxiety and fear about all the things that go bump in the night, the real and imaginary demons that inhabit their world and ours. Playing with what frightens helps a child develop the emotional resources they need to manage life's ordinary frights and unexpected horrors. Growing up helps. Some. Childhood’s fears diminish. But adult fears can be larger and more precise, more reasonable.

Fear is a useful emotion. Fear signals caution, risk up ahead, be careful.

Fear of heights; get down. Fear of swimming too far off the beach. Swim back now, before you are tired. Fear of being caught doing something one shouldn't do. Don't do it. Being afraid is perfectly appropriate when confronted with something risky, wrong or unsafe, something whose power should be respected. Fear of God is not terrifying but humbling and awesome, a reverence before power far greater and wiser than one's own.

Indeed fear is a creative emotion. When fear is recognized and addressed, safety can be restored, risks can be lessened. Schools grow from fear of ignorance; Medicine from fear of disease; Seat belts from fear of accidents. Every saving invention from Lighthouses to Fire extinguishers to tax accountants was motivated by realistic fears.

Some fears are unknown; some kept secret. Whether unconscious or unbearable, these fears assert themselves, often in a fiercely unuseful way. A favorite film example occurs in Splendor in the Grass. Natalie Wood nor Warren Beatty are too frightened to acknowledge or speak of the love and passion they feel. Beatty's character (hardly presidential material here) fears he will offend Natalie's character if he is honest and shares his fierce feelings, a lust that threatens them both, instead runs off leaving Natalie to believe he finds her undesirable. "Tell her," I shout at the screen. "Tell her." But he doesn't and, devastated, she slips into insanity.

Some fears are unreasonable or misguided. Sometimes, although do not feel this way to those who hold them.. Fear of the dark, fear of water, of closed spaces, of open places, of heights, fear of cats and dogs, fear of responsibility, fear of commitment, fear of having children or of not having children; Guilty fears can be unreasonable. Fears of inadequacy often are. Endless tiny worries, real and imagined, can grow large when undiminished by reason's proportion. Sometimes a vague notion is all fear's grip requires to immobilize.

Fears are after all not only emotions. Fear is the body's alarm, triggering physical reactions. A person being chased by a rampaging bull has an adrenaline infusion that makes jumping an otherwise too tall fence possible.

 Chronic fear, daily fear induces constant stimulation, persistent stress, taxing the body and, researchers tell us, rob years from our lives. Constant fear agitates body and soul. Fainting, nausea, heart palpitations, ulcers, the body is upset by fears undiminished by invention or untended by reason. People can worry themselves sick with fear.

 Apart from all the candy and fright, Halloween is a healthy holiday, helping us to address much of what frightens. For the first step in conquering fear is to name it. To look at it. To talk about it. To be reminded that one is not alone. Fear's paralyzing grip is loosened when as companions in a world not of our making, we admit to fears we share.

 Fear of getting lost. Fear of forgetting to pick up a child at school. Fear of getting old. Fear of forgetting. When we admit the fears we can laugh and cry, share our wisdom and our follies, develop strategies together to manage both the terror and some consequences.

Sometimes, we lie to each other. We pretend we are not afraid. We live as if it, whatever horrible thing it is, we live as if it can't happen here. I have my It; you have yours. Unthinkable, unspeakable, It.

Some fears are not imagined. Some fears are reasonable. No one doubts the peril of war, of nuclear annihilation; or the horror of indiscriminate violence or unnecessary accidents; or the struggle of disabling injury or illness. Some fears are justified. We should do whatever we can, whatever we must, to prevent these fears from being realized.

What-if's can haunt us. The nightly news simultaneously both fuels such fears and provides a wake up call. We must do what we can, or remain fearful and vulnerable to tragedies and terrors we know are possible, however improbable.

When justifiably fearful, one can be defeated by a false belief that a danger should be avoided. Run away. Run away. But even a dreadful danger if it is frankly and openly faced can empower. Life can be cruel and terrible. And no one escapes. "[A person] has not learned the lesson of life" observed Emerson, " who does not every day surmount a fear." The secret to managing real and reasonable fears, is to be challenged and encouraged to action rather than immobilized by dread.

A few of us find this easier than most of us. We seek out fearful situations---bungee cord jumping comes to mind here as does climbing Mt. Everest but so too learning as adult to play the piano or finding a new and different career. People take risks.

Some toy with fear as if it were good practice for managing the real things that go bump in our nights. Carnival fun houses are both escape and fears enjoyable exercise. Horror movies delight us with dread. Well not all of us. Many did not find H.G. Wells' tales entertaining. Not the Red Room. Not the radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. Some, I among them, think ordinary life is frightening enough the way it is without imagining new terrors.

Yet Halloween reminds us that fascination with fear can helps develop the resources we need to manage both the fears of ordinary days as well as the unspeakable ones that inhabit our worst nightmares. When we read of demons defeated, of ghosts laid to rest, of monsters met and slain, we are reassured that good can triumph over evil and the world be made as safe as we could wish it to be. When we see humanity, ourselves, at our fearful worse, our meanest, most selfish and vengeful, our most misdirected and unredeemed, we are inspired to find safer, finer ways of living together in a world both confounding and fearsome. The macabre tale, the ghoulish movie, brings fear's wise relief and insanity's healing.

No doubt to serve this purpose, on summer holiday in 1816, housebound by torrential rains, Mary Shelley, her poet husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and friends amused themselves by reading aloud ghost stories to one another. Thoroughly spooked, Percy ran from the room, horrified by one tale's perverse image brewed at one of the maddest English tea parties. Fascinated by the exquisitely fearful atmosphere they had created, they decided that each would write out his or her own ghost story. Mary Shelley's Tale of Frankenstein is the only one to survive.

"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he'd put together." she wrote , describing the tales chilling beginning. "I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful it would be the effect of any human endeavor to mark the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world....he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror stricken."

What had he done? Created a monster. Of what sort? For what horror? A monster, vivid in print than on film, whose unbearable loneliness for a mate drives it to vengeful destructiveness. Are we not all sometimes lonely? Sometimes fearfully so? Yes, but, we could never? We would never?

From another time, another tale, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, was written then, as most are written now, as a money maker. Stevenson's Victorian wife was so offended by its horror that he burned the original and wrote a tamer, morally redeeming new version. What evil resides within? asks the tale? Behind one's socially acceptable, morally upright self? Behind what other self? What are we, any of us, capable of doing and being without anyone, least of all ourselves, ever suspecting? Are we not sometimes conflicted? Do we not sometimes confuse sense and nonsense, good and ill?

Bram Stoker's Dracula by contrast is a tale of terror about the evil out there. Impersonal, unknowns that chill one's soul. Dracula is a vampire who must ghoulishly master those people on whose blood he depends for life. Will the world's evils steal our souls? Will manipulative others rob us of our character, our virtue and our life?

These are tales of horror offer us mirrors by which to see better our worst fears realized. Not some alien attack. Not some skeleton on the lawn. Not some ill begotten monster. No, just us and our companions at our ordinary worst.

Reading tales of horror is, of course, one thing; facing life's horrors is quite another. In frightening tales we may feel the anxiety, the fascination, the horror, but the frightful thing described is safely out there somewhere, separate from us, a far off, forgotten, when the book covers are closed. In our everyday lives, fright moves in with us, borrows everything we hold dear and threatens us where we are most vulnerable.

Getting this roommate to move out, managing our fears, involves more than naming or confronting them, more than wise, if serious, play, and more than a tolerance and fascination for classic or contemporary tales of horror. A willful courage and unswerving faith are what is needed.

Courage, as our earlier story illustrated ("I knew It All Along" in Jenifer Justice Ghost Stories), is not the absence of fear but the willingness to face our fear, to look directly at the goblin's hands around our ankles and discover, in that moment of bravery, that what holds us back is just a vine, a vicious vine to be sure, but a vine we will manage to untangle from our leg.

Herman Melville in Moby Dick makes this point when Starbuck, chief mate of the Pequod, cautions his crew. "I will have no one in my boat," Starbuck says, "who is not afraid of a whale." The most reliable and useful courage, he illustrates, arises from a fair estimation of the peril before one, an honest reckoning with the fear and a respectful will to face it and win. Utterly fearless people are far more dangerous than cowards whose bravery is a willful if terrified act.

"We become brave," Aristotle observed, "by doing brave acts...by being habituated to despise things that are terrible" and by standing "our ground against them we become brave, and it is when we have become so [brave]that we shall be able to stand our ground against them."

Ordinary life is full of occasions when fear needs to be recognized and measured accurately that one might, undeterred, move on as one will and must. One might remember here notable folks like Rosa Parks who, undoubtedly fearful of what retaliation could be expected, nevertheless refused to give up her seat on a Birmingham bus. But equally so one may recall hundreds of acts of ordinary bravery by ordinary people who despite fears for their own safety or reasonable probabilities acted to stave off some tragedy or to move us all forward to a world, to communities nearer yet to those we only imagine and long for.

In the midst of personal or public acts of courage, a good measure of faith can serve one well. What else would compel some people to set aside reasonable fears and to risk everything? What else encourages one to create something, something not necessarily less frightening but clearly more life blessing. Fear and faith are true opposites. Faith is a confidence and a trust, an attitude about life and people. Faith is the conviction that what we together can acknowledge and talk about we together can surmount and survive. "Nothing else matters much," preached Fosdick, "but that we should be able to believe in life." Faith is a unfailing belief in life and in ourselves.

When the world around us seems filled with anticipated threats too overwhelming to understand, when our fears threaten to paralyse us and our worst fantasies to deaden our wills, when we are tempted to hide under the covers until the danger passes, may courage and confidence urge us onward. On this Halloween, may the lawn theater be as fierce as our fears may reveal and our faith as firm as our trust in life demands. In small ways and large, for great stakes or small, may we have faith that a Life and a Love, more stalwart and stable than ourselves, steadier and more abiding than even our most beloved companions, holds us all, whatever may frighten and befall us. Oh, yes, "from ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night, protect us...." Amen.
 

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