Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) Read Online Free PDF Page A

sandwich for all of us to eat. (She also informed me that bobbing for apples, which one of the other mothers had agreed to facilitate, was unhygienic and that I should put some serious thought into whether I really wanted to participate.) Nevertheless, I was beginning to suspect that something else altogether was holding up my costume.
    “I don’t believe in ghosts and monsters,” she’d said when I asked her if such things were real.
    “What about witches?”
    “Witchcraft is real, but God doesn’t like it.” I’d heard the word witchcraft before but never given it much thought. I’d been under the impression that it was the made-up stuff of fiction, like the harmless bits of magic Samantha the witch performed in reruns of the old TV show Bewitched or the more wicked but equally unlikely feats that set fairy tales into motion.
    “What about skeletons and jack-o’-lanterns?” My best friend’s parents had toasted the pumpkin seeds after carving her jack-o’-lantern, and we sprinkled them with salt and ate them. They were so delicious I’d persuaded my mother to let us do the same at home. My father had even carved a smiling face into my pumpkin and put a nub of a candle inside.
    “We’re Christians,” my mother reminded me. “We believe in God and Jesus.” She made her face expressionless and relaxed in a manner that hinted something heavy might be on the way. “And, as a Christian, I don’t think God is very happy on Halloween.”
    I wondered how one night of kids in costumes out trick-or-treating could bother God.
    “I know dressing up and getting candy is fun,” she continued, “but what Halloween celebrates, things like evil spirits and demons, are the things of the occult. They belong to the devil, and they can be dangerous.”
    I’d heard those words before, too— spirits, demons, the occult . They came up at church, in stories where one of God’s followers must remind his foolish and forgetful people of God’s commandments. Like Moses, when the Israelites went to such lengths in order to worship a golden calf. Or Jesus, casting out demons from the possessed. Though I had never personally come up against an evil spirit or a demon and doubted that I ever would, my mother was asking me to understand that such stories were warnings I ought to take seriously. Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour . The stakes my mother was hinting at were far higher than they appeared to be.
    I sensed that she was torn. She wanted to make me understand the bigger picture, but she also wanted to make me happy. She was most concerned, I’d guess, with the symbolism of a night like Halloween,the things our costumes and make-believe fright seemed to glorify. But she also understood how excessive it would be to argue that a single night of trick-or-treating could have had heavy implications for my everlasting soul.
    And I was torn, too. I knew she wanted me to make the right decisions in all things, just like the children in Little Visits with God , decisions that would glorify God. She would probably have been very glad if I had then and there decided to retract my request and skip Halloween altogether, but I couldn’t get the candy out of my mind and the fun my friend Kim had assured me of. I wanted to push harder, to make her see that I understood the danger (I thought I did) and that I would be careful to keep my heart and spirit attuned to God and all that was good (I would certainly try). But I also sensed there was a good chance that if I questioned Halloween any further, her sense of moral duty might require her to put on the brakes, to shut down the Halloween machine entirely, so I nodded and forced myself to say nothing. She eyed me a moment, thinking but choosing not to speak, and the conversation dwindled away.
    The thirty-first fell on a Monday. The snake sandwich was really just chicken salad on long submarine rolls, which