Fire and shopping

It's a Sunday evening, and a juniper-wood fire crackles away softly in the fireplace. Two tongues of flame rise from the cinders, and red-glowing sticks—wood no longer, only ashes that have not yet collapsed--lie crazily in relief against the blackened bricks.

I'm drinking a cup of coffee. The beans were from “Trader Giotto's,” as the ricotta packages say. Coffee reminds me of HRC, soon going to Italy, and of the spaghetti lunch fundraiser I'm decorating for in a mere two weeks.

We went to Santa Fe this afternoon for lunch, printer ink, and fabric to decorate with. I found a vaguely Italianate red-and-yellow calico on the clearance rack, but it turned out to be misfiled and not on sale at all, so I settled for eighteen yards of cappuccino-colored muslin. I'm going to drape it above the serving hatch and as curtains over the windows. Mom has a giant piece of heavy blue, red, and mustard upholstery cloth, which ought not be cut, that I think I'll hang over the end wall. That room is so vast and bare and cinder-block-ey. The big fabric can be an arras. Polonius, beware.

The fire is being ornery tonight. For some reason, the logs and sticks refuse to land where I want them, but hang off the grate or perch at acute and slippery angles instead of the nice, neat latitude-and-longitude layers that hold still and burn in place until crumbling to ashes.

The sticks really do glow. There's no other word to describe it. For a moment there, half a dozen of them were sticking up and glowing solidly, making patterns in the dark fireplace like Ent-fingers or tree branches against the sky. It was a little eerie, the sort of thing that would have been appropriate under the witches' cauldron in IV.1.

Or perhaps I've just walked down too many aisles of Halloween decorations. They're highly in evidence. In fact, at the Mexican restaurant where I had lunch yesterday, the Grim Reaper (rather taller and more inflatable than I had ever imagined him) stood guard over the cash register, his ragged sleeve creating a canopy for the girl at the cash register to peer through.

Probably most people who get into the whole Halloween thing don't mean anything particularly spiritual or devilish by it. But I have my doubts about it. It can't be good for a culture to be saturated, even for a season, with all that is most ugly and fearful.

The fire has died down. There are hardly any flames at all, just a dull red under-glow.

It can't improve the soul to make your living manufacturing giant rats, plastic tombstones, glow-in-the-dark jack o'lantern stickers, and suchlike. The Reformers and Dorothy Sayers talked a lot about the value of work, but “the only Christian work is good work well done.” It may be work, and presumably people make money doing it, but—is it worth doing? Is anyone truly better off because they can buy a bloody amputated limb? There are probably legitimate times and reasons to buy such things—like dramas—but I wonder. Can you really be motivated to do your work well if your work is creating ugliness for its own sake?

And the worst of it is, these Halloween aisles have a strange attraction and make the Christmas aisles next door look tame. For some reason, I want to walk by the fake ghouls and gremlins. What on earth for? I guess if I, who love the One who takes out the real ghouls, am attracted, I don't have to wonder why others are too.

I suspect we'd be rather less enthusiastic about putting an imitation disintegrating human corpse on our front doorstep if we had to walk by real dead humans, like the crucified slaves along the highway after Spartacus' rebellion; we'd like it even less if we'd known and loved those humans. But at the same time we decorate for Halloween, our prisoners are executed cleanly (or not executed, as the case may be, no matter what their offense) and our cemeteries are tucked away in back corners, where we do not walk through them on our way to church every week. We have such short memories. But the image of God is still in people, though twisted and uglified by the fall, and I do not willingly celebrate the corruption of the body.

Once I think about it, of course, the Incarnation is much more radical than mere human death. It was through Easter that Halloween was done away, and through Christmas that Easter was made possible. “On that beautiful, scandalous night...” Humans ought to die. God made us upright, but we have sought out many devices. Yet He who knew no sin became sin on our behalf, and the sting of death, which is sin, has been removed. Blessed be His name! As I was talking about today with Lisa, when sin is dealt with, the devil can't really hurt us any more.

The wood at odd jaggedy angles has burned away, and I put a central piece of the juniper trunk on the fire, straight across. It still has branches sticking out all round that caught brightly. I added a few more sticks parallel to and right across it. It's burning well.

For our God is a consuming fire.