The Haunted

Two of our grandchildren called the other afternoon and asked my wife, Gail, and me, if we could come for dinner and a video. When grandchildren call and invite you to do anything, you cancel plans for your dinner at the White House, give away your Red Sox/Yankee tickets, and reschedule your London trip so that you can say “yes.”

The video they rented was called Seven Pounds, and starred Will Smith. Its ending contains surprises I’ll not relate lest I be a spoiler. But this much is safe to say: the story is about a man who is haunted by events in his past. Seven Pounds is worth seeing!

The day after we saw the video with the grandchildren, I finished a novel by Pulitzer Prize author Richard Russo called That Old Cape Magic. It too was about a man who was haunted by the situation with his parents: one dead, the other alive and living in nursing home.

In a clever use of symbolism, Russo writes of Griffin, the book’s central character, as he drives from one end of Cape Cod to the other seeking a place where he can dispose of his father’s ashes which are sealed in an urn in the wheel well of his trunk. Griffin’s search for the perfect disposal site occupies the better part of a summer or two. His efforts are complicated by a daily deluge of cell phone calls from his bed-ridden mother who can be best described as snarly, cynical, and demanding. What is clear is that Griffin, both as a boy and a man, has always been haunted by his parents—dead or alive. He cannot shake off their influence upon his life.

The word haunted is usually linked to the notion of ghosts and mysterious places (houses, caves, and dark forests). It comes up in these weird horror movies that young people love. When I was a boy, we used the word regularly at camp during the mandatory telling of ghost stories. I was once so scared by one of these stories that I wet my sleeping bag.

But haunted ought to be used in other contexts also. We shouldn’t waste a good word.

My first memorable haunting—the one that hangs on me after all these years—came as a small boy when, while playing, I knocked over a prized lamp in my family’s living room. The lamp base made of some kind of ceramic material suffered a vertical crack, which I was sure would horrify my parents and earn me a whipping. Rather than face the consequences immediately, I turned the cracked side of the lamp toward the wall with the hope that no one would see the damage.

For many mornings after, I awakened from sleep with an almost paralyzing sense of dread as I wondered if this would be the day when someone, parent-sized, would discover the cracked lamp. I could not walk through the living room without checking on the crack fearing that it was growing larger. I also entertained the hope that the crack would somehow go away by itself or that I would discover that the original “accident” had only been a bad dream and that the lamp was actually unbroken. Haunting, it needs to be said, sparks the imagination.

When the day of discovery finally came, my mother surprised me with her gracious reaction. She entered into the conspiracy of my secret, and from then on she always placed the lamp with its crack to the wall at dusting time. In doing so she defeated my haunting. My father never found out. There was never a whipping.

In all of these situations—the video, the book, camp, the lamp—the notion of haunting has to do with the presence of strange, seemingly uncontrollable powers of uncertain origin that can cause havoc and fear in one’s life. When haunted we cower and shrivel before things perceived as greater than we are. We become less than we were created to be. We are slaves to something beyond us which, often, we can barely discern.

The Bible describes people and situations where haunted best describes the experience. Saul, first king of Israel, was certainly a haunted man. Ammon, son of David, was haunted by lust, and Absalom, another son, was haunted by revenge. Judas Iscariot seems to have been haunted by self-hate. Simon Peter must have been haunted whenever he recalled his denial of Jesus. And I bet Paul—despite being forgiven—was haunted by memories of the persecuting days before his Damascus conversion. Some things do not totally go away in the relative shortness of a lifetime.

Legion, the man of Gadara, was horribly haunted until Jesus broke the evil control with a power-word and restored him to civility, dignity, and a right mind.

A person can be haunted by guilt, by fear, by regret, by anger and resentment. He or she can be haunted by envy, discontent, or lust. The list, I suppose, is rather large. Can addiction be described as a haunting? If so, it makes sense that a twelve-stepper begins with the affirmation, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” Could a rephrasing of this read, “We admitted that we were haunted by alcohol … “?

I need to add that there is a positive version of haunting. Biblical people call it conviction and attribute it to the Holy Spirit who is said to poke and prod about the soul and kindle a sorrow that leads to repentance. This seems to have been the experience of David the king and Jonah the runaway prophet. They were haunted back into a right way.

I feel like I’ve met Nathan, David’s accuser, more than once, and I equate the innards of that whale with feelings I sometimes get when I am in a small, fully packed commuter jet on a hot day. Either the jet or the whale can haunt you into attentiveness when God has something to say to you. In such a fix you almost always end up repenting of something.

If haunting describes the effect of any kind of power that is greater than ourselves, how might the spell of an evil haunting be broken?

I’d like to suggest that this is one of the uber-effects of genuine worship. To place oneself under the “spell” of an everlasting God who is known to be righteous, holy, wise, all-knowing, gracious and redemptive is to begin the breaking of the haunting. In worship one is caught up in the thrall of that power which intimidates and shatters all other powers. The demons are defeated; the fear subsides.

Over the centuries, ourbiblical ancestors have taught us that haunt-breaking worship includes song, praise, thanksgiving, adoring silence, prayer, the reading of scripture, the Eucharistic event, the “I-believes,” and acts of contrition.

So what if these things are not happening in many congregations today? What if churches have ceased being a safe place for haunted people? And what if increasing numbers of folk have chosen other things than worship to occupy their time.

Would that suggest an increasing number of people who will go all the way through life being haunted … in the wrong way?

All these speculations originated out of a call by our grandchildren. If anything I’ve said bothers, blame them. They started it.