Halloween is a fun holiday with youth dressing up, trick or treating and spooky houses, fun spooky movies, but every year the month of October is turned into a month of television with so many horror movie advertisements being played to conjure up the holiday as a license for evil to be broadcasted. Halloween was originally designed to scare the evil away and now it seems we invite it in to our living rooms or sometimes just have it as an uninvited guest interrupting our shows when watching television.
I have never quite understood the fascination with horror movies, man’s inhumanity to man being sensationalized, but to each his own. However, we do need to be aware as a society that our diet for this entertainment is increasing and desensitizing us to it. Society’s progress is dependent on us becoming more humane, compassionate, civilized, accepting, loving toward others and not letting these essential qualities slowly fade into irrelevancy. Jesus tells us, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Our spiritual purity, our heart’s intake, is worth feeding with an overdose of goodness to combat the aggressiveness of the world’s preoccupation with what is gross and animalistic in nature. Somehow the beauty of creation that we see all around us becomes less if we dull our senses to it with a barrage of fear, hatred and destruction. In Germany, part of their healthcare system is to encourage retreats to beautiful, relaxing places of nature to find the stillness that is so helpful to our well-being. We can find this stillness in giving ourselves moments of quiet and not allowing ourselves to be mesmerized by that which is the very opposite of what is useful to us. I find daily prayer and walks in nature very helpful. In my prayer, I align my thought with God’s thoughts that uplift, free and provide dominion in my own thinking. God helps me in this prayer and studying His inspiration that he has provided through His Word helps me identify His thoughts that heal the heart, soul and mind.
A Bible resource book I often refer to for inspiration, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, offers this insight, “If mortals would keep proper ward over mortal mind, the brood of evils which infest it would be cleared out. We must begin with this so-called mind and empty it of sin and sickness, or sin and sickness will never cease. The present codes of human systems disappoint the weary searcher after a divine theology, adequate to the right education of human thought….You must control evil thoughts in the first instance, or they will control you in the second. Jesus declared that to look with desire on forbidden objects was to break a moral precept. He laid great stress on the
action of the human mind, unseen to the senses. Evil thoughts and aims reach no farther and do no more harm than one’s belief permits. Evil thoughts, lusts, and malicious purposes cannot go forth, like wandering pollen, from one human mind to another, finding unsuspected lodgment, if virtue and truth build a strong defence.”
Obviously most people can distinguish between entertainment and acting on it, but we do need to be aware that our thinking affects our moods, actions, and well-being, more than I think we are willing to admit to ourselves. If we want to feel that innate joy, that is within, more in our lives, try giving yourself the gift of guarding what you are entertaining yourself with in your thinking. Gratitude and acknowledgment of the good, even if you have to be the one to initiate the good around you, is the place to start. November usually embraces this idea with Thanksgiving, a nice balance to our culture’s interpretation of October. Then again, the more obnoxious evil gets the more we are inclined to open our eyes to and fight for more good in our lives.
Anne Cooling
Co-Sunday School Superintendent
First Church of Christ, Scientist, Laguna Niguel
