DOES CHRIST SEE THE HAUNTED?
Photo from Unsplash.
Wisconsin is a beautiful state to drive through in the fall. Creeks, bluffs, and orange-hued forests punctuate the farmlands for which we are best known. Evocative of the numinous and the eerie both, this terrain invites even as it defamiliarizes. Such a drive will most likely take you to any number of hauntings, known only to locals, places to which the ghosts of stillborn ambitions, as well as the revenants of former dwellers of the land, still cleave.
It’s haunted in other ways, as well: TRUMP 2020 billboards litter hilly turns in the road, becoming visible only once it’s too late. UNMASK OUR KIDS—MASK BY CHOICE and GOD BLESS OUR POLICE OFFICERS signs dot the lawns of those who work these fields, amidst jack-o-lanterns, scarecrows, and other Halloween ephemera. A story has found this place empty, swept, and put in order, a story that brings with it other terrible spirits and insidious attitudes and beliefs.
How is it that people so attuned to the rhythms of nature, so versed in the cycles of life and death and habituated to recognize health can be so blind to life and health’s opposite? Totemic keywords and package deal ethics (1) seem to be operative here just as much as they are for lock-step progressives, locking them into fairy tales of strong men who will reorder American society and restore decency. They fear the howling forces being summoned elsewhere in the country: forces portending upheaval and possibly even the dismantling of the long-established and seemingly trustworthy. Ghosts of imagined pasts and potential futures both haunt this landscape.
But there are other spirits that have been summoned that call this place home as well, energies conjured by individuals without the disciplined patience of those who care for the land, individuals who have yearned to see what is Outside the prosaic realm of the everyday and bring it back Inside.
Whitewater, Wisconsin, has been rumored to be haunted by witches and the effects of their rituals and conjurations for generations. There isn’t a great deal of documentation that can confirm many of these stories as more than merely stories—every university student in Whitewater will aver that witchcraft and spooky phenomena occur more or less regularly in the Witches Triangle but also have a hard time specifying who it was who saw what and when—but the mood and the sensibility of witchery and phantasmic infestation pervade the city. However filled with the energy of college life and Midwestern good cheer this sleepy town may be, a shadow clings to this place, earning it the sinister nickname of Second Salem.
The aforementioned Witches Triangle is formed by Calvary, Oak Grove, and Hillside Cemeteries; within that isosceles triangle, shadows prowl, lights dance, and an axe-wielding specter is rumored to skulk about. At the triangle’s centroid once stood the Morris Pratt Institute, also known as the “Spook Temple,” a school devoted to the study and practice of Spiritualism. Though the Institute hasn’t been operative for decades, many believe that what went on there played a part in Whitewater’s receptivity to the otherworldly. Rumors of black magic and secretive rituals abound, and with them sightings of ghosts, shadow figures, and even a creature in Whitewater Lake.
Drive further east and you will come to Elkhorn, the home of a creature that has come to be known as the Bray Road Beast. The Beast resembles nothing so much as a gigantic werewolf. It supposedly prowls the road from which its name is derived but seems to frequent the Kettle Moraine area more largely. The Beast has been linked to Satanic activity in the past, as evidence of cult activity in the Kettle Moraine and in Elkhorn preceded its first contemporary sightings in 1980s and 90s. Particularly frightening is the account an eyewitness gave, in which the Beast was kneeling with outstretched paws, holding a dead animal as if liturgically making an offering.
I have personally looked for the Beast on several occasions but have yet to see it. Once, however, while trekking through a patch of woods along the road with a group of friends during a fierce thunderstorm, some phrases from Satanic invocations I had read while researching suddenly sprang into my mind. Both the suddenness and the specificity unnerved me. I told the person nearest me, “We need to get out of here,” and no sooner did I speak then we all set to running the mile and a half to our car before the next lightning bolt could crackle across the sky.
These are but two examples relatively close to my own home; there are more elsewhere in the state. Many, though not all of them, are supposed to be traceable to persons drawing upon nonhuman energies to break open the closed circle of the quotidian. Afraid of the banality of the given, they turned to the unseen to rupture the limits which we all, at times, resent. Fear animated their actions, and the consequences have brought forth more fear. Playing host to entities of inhuman moral motivation opens the door to invasive hostility.
These stories cannot be dismissed in toto, without investigation, as superstition, as superstition isn’t an intrinsically meaningful category. It’s an abstraction that only takes on meaning when used to distinguish religion from other beliefs. But it does so to assert religion’s a priori superiority over those other beliefs. That is, religion is knowledge as opposed to superstition—it damns a concept the moment the word is applied. It was thus a rhetorically useful category centuries ago to the Reformers and other proponents of reform, who could identify certain aspects of their Catholic opponents’ faith and practice as superstition, and in doing so, both relegate it to meaninglessness and commend themselves in a single move.
In the same way, science is reified and set over against religion and superstition in the contemporary world to contrive a binary opposition between ways of knowing, with one being ludicrously false and one being uncomplicatedly true. But again, this is posturing made possible by setting the terms in opposition to each other from the outset so as to make the existence of the one the limit and control of the other.
These plausibility structures seem authoritative and all-encompassing when we are discussing events from afar, but within the geometries of our home, our street, our city or county, those easy certainties are too big, too obtuse to fit. They cannot police reality; they evaporate the moment we encounter that which we had been assured was superstitious nonsense. But when the intransigently weird discloses itself and overturns our safe presumptions, how can we cope with it?
It is a quality of mercy in Anglicanism that it reckons seriously with what its other Protestant brethren would dismiss as superstition. But it seems to me there is a humility in the most honest streams of Anglicanism which acknowledges that the English Reformation was not set out upon from wholly unsullied purposes or carried out blamelessly; that however it may have come to be, a via media that was never the intention of Cranmer or likely even of Hooker. So much of what is good within Anglicanism has been ‘happened upon,’ embraced more out of an experimental recognition of a thing’s pastoral value, or its resonance with the practices which viscerally link us to the living Christ, or the insight it brings to what has been inherited but only half-understood. But if our strength is in holding fast to that which nourishes devotion and delivers substantive consolation, then this is strength enough: we don’t have to pride ourselves on innovation or uncompromised purity. After all, we can’t. And so we may have never felt the necessity of building or relying upon that defensive binary of Religion and Superstition which our brethren did, aware that what was of utmost importance was relating the work and reign of Jesus Christ to the concrete dilemmas facing Christians where they were.
And so Anglicanism from its beginning has dealt with the anxieties and fears of parishioners with earnestness. The collect for Matins’ thanksgiving for having been brought safely through the night, for example, prayerfully captures the terrors which gripped many men and women of the sixteenth century. The 1549 Prayer Book included a rite of exorcism to be performed in its liturgy for baptism, an acknowledgement of parents’ fears that their children could enter the world under the sway of the Evil One. This was especially important as it was popularly feared at that time that children who died before baptism “would flit about in the woods and waste places and could get no rest.” (2)
This did not amount to manufacturing roles for Christ he did not promise to undertake. Rather, it is a pastoral application of his completed mission to the eerie and foreboding things which threaten our sanity, our very sense of order and reality. These eerie things disrupt the manufactured order of secularization, but they only do so to frighten us into redirecting our loyalty from one placebo Christ to another. The Prayer Book has always sought to verbally bring these things within the net of the delivering Word which the darkness has never comprehended or extinguished (John 1:5).
Fear exposes us for what we really are: creatures profoundly dependent upon a lord who can deliver us from those things that threaten us. Fear can bring focus to what we love, but fear is also routinely nourished and exploited so as to recruit normally well-meaning persons to causes which they would otherwise recognize as too horrifying to consider. Moreover, when our fears are not taken seriously, it is easier for us to be deceived by those who promise an end to nightmares. Ghastly manifestations of Sin, Death, and chaos are summoned when our fear is weaponized in this way.
But the Christ who made a spectacle of the defeated powers is not unconcerned with the terrors that afflict us. He doesn’t tell us to grow up. But he also doesn’t use our fear and our need to amass power at others’ expense. He regards those who are haunted by all manner of phantasmic stories, both the overtly paranormal as well as the more banal sorts of spiritual darkness which choke our faith, hope, and love. He’s confronting these powers now, disenchanting their efforts to colonize our lifeworlds and fearfully enchant us. Wherever the uncanny is disregarded as superstition and yet manifests itself, Jesus Christ is ready to believe you, to come to your aid and overcome these powers. Amen.
Rowan Williams, “Pope of the Masses: Is Francis Really the People’s Champion?”, The New Statesman, https://www.newstatesman.com/uncategorized/2015/09/pope-masses-francis-really-people-s-champion
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, quoted in Alan Jacobs, The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 207.
