Meditation on Halloween #2

Meditation on Halloween #2

It’s a long established understanding that “the clothes make the man.” Increasing, men and women are judged by what they wear. Students often wear T-Shirts in a fashionably shabby layered look. Faculty wear casual dress: dresses, jackets, ties and the like. At the minimum, it’s a khaki world. Of course, corporate wears blue and black corporate.

Dress separates our lives and gives us easy understanding of who’s responsible for what. Just imagine what the world at UNO would look like if corporate wore T-shirts, faculty dress blues and blacks, and students wore khaki’s. That would be upside down. Even more upside down would be a life where students had more than enough income from the University and corporate people would wait tables to have enough money to pay bills. I would volunteer to take a photo of that!

Jesus was a beggar, you know. The guy the corporation was named after went through the countryside with an entourage of a few dozen (only 12 were notables) and they had to scrounge for food. Dumpster Divers maybe. It was common for that time that holy men and women were often beggars, living off the good graces of those who had enough to spare.

Matthew 12
1At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the sabbath; his disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. 2When the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the sabbath.” 3He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? 4He entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests. 5Or have you not read in the law that on the sabbath the priests in the temple break the sabbath and yet are guiltless? 6I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. 7But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. 8For the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.”

In those days, life was immediate, death close at hand, and to survive, people learned to share. Jesus’ life was not pretty. He was a beggar. He had nothing, and what he had, he tended to give away.

It’s odd that Halloween has become a time of begging from door to door. Maybe we should try begging a little more often. At least we would learn, as individuals and in groups, that we have a connection with the destitute.

A fun thing to do today: stop by the Weber Arts Center and visit the Hispanic exhibit on the “Day of the Dead”: hilarious views of death and the dead.