The Holiness of Horror
Horror: Latin, "dread, veneration, religious awe," a figurative use, literally "a shaking, trembling (as with cold or fear), shudder, chill," from horrere "to bristle with fear, shudder," from PIE root *ghers- "to bristle" (source also of Sanskrit harsate "bristles," Avestan zarshayamna- "ruffling one's feathers," Latin eris (genitive) "hedgehog," Welsh garw "rough").
I love the word “Horror!”
I love it so much because, in a bizarre way, it is about the essence of worship. When we hear the word “horror,” most people think of a genre of gory movies with people in mortal danger. There is some inhumane monster in the dark with a knife or sharp teeth chasing a vulnerable protagonist. For thousands of years, maybe as old as storytelling itself, humanity has been fascinated and entertained by creative variations on the horror story. We have always been drawn to, and repelled by, the ritual. We are horrified by that which is more mysterious and unknown, the essence that threatens our mortality.
One of my favorite pictures of this kind of horror in Scripture is the story of Isaiah’s encounter with God’s presence in the temple. In Isaiah Chapter 6, the prophet is terrified ( another spiritual word ) because the whole place starts shaking and filling with smoke. The setting becomes flooded with the supernatural, and he cries out, “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
I feel like we’re friends, so I’m just going to say this, I think a modern-day equivalent of Isaiah’s words might have been “HOLY SH**!!!” If the same thing was to happen any one of us, regardless of where we fall on the spiritual spectrum of atheist to theist, I’m confident we would be petrified. The fear is part of what makes the moment holy. Fear is often the first response to the presence of God. Time and again in Scripture, the first thing a messenger from God says when they appear to a person is, “do not be afraid!” Fear is the natural response to a holy moment. The fear is holy because Isaiah survives. If he were to die from the fear or be eaten alive, that would be a different kind of story. That would be a tragedy. Horror stories, on the other hand, send a shock to our system that can be very life-affirming.
The rituals we’ve created out of fear to teach each other about survival and theories about deeper truths of existence have become embedded in our psyche, like a complex code in our DNA. They connect us to the unknowable center of the universe. The Dark Matter. The Mysterious Void. Chaos* (oh yeah! This baby needs an asterisk! It’s at the bottom of the post.) People are afraid of chaos.
Every Sunday for the last nine months, my family has made a tradition of having family movie nights with our friend Brandon at his house.
We eat nachos.
We watch a baking show and a movie.
We eat a cake. (not a mistake, we eat A cake.)
Every week.
It is perfect.
The Romig-Leavitt’s have long held this tradition, but we moved it to Brandon’s when he was given the news that his doctors found cancer in his lungs… Cancer that would need to be removed by surgery… Chaos.
For now, it looks like the chaos has subsided since there have been several subsequent scans after the surgery, and all things are clear. There were more than a few scares, but more than this, the door that led to more deep-rooted fear of chaos, has been cracked open.
In the last few weeks, we’ve decided to watch a couple of thrillers together, specifically the classics “Wait Until Dark” with Audrey Hepburn, and M. Night Shymalan’s “The Village.” Both movies coincidentally feature female protagonists who are blind. We didn’t intend to line it up that way ( I only now just thought of it). Blindness is one of the most vulnerable human conditions. The way humans operate in the world depends so much on sight, when it is dark, and we can’t see, we are plunged into chaos. Stories with a blind protagonist connect with everyone on a primal level because in some way, we have all felt blind.
There are a couple of moments in these movies when there is a good “jump-scare,” which is the moment when the monster lunges or the killer jumps from the shadows with a knife. The experience is all at once terrifying, exhilarating, and hilarious! Almost always, the follow-up response to the jump-scare is a release of laughter. Laughter, because you see all at once that the fear was not founded in reality. The perceived chaos was all part of the final order of the story!
The famous thrill-director, Orson Wells once said, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” The “scare,” the “chaos” is essential to a good story. It gives the story its meaning, but without the rest of the story, it is nothing more than violence. It is meaningless, wasted pain. The context of horror is everything!
There is a name for the experience of constant chaos, I call that “hell” People cannot survive in hell yet, there are places in the world, right now, where people are trapped in hell.
Trapped between two armies desperate for power.
Trapped between two races desperate for belonging.
Trapped between genders desperate for an identity.
Trapped in a religion with a monster-god who demands love or else he will inflict torture forever. When humans live too long in worlds of chaos they become less human and more animal. They revert to behaviors of self-preservation, tribalism, survival, and violence.
The absence of chaos, on the other hand, is another type of meaningless suffering. Without chaos, all that is left is an inhumane totalitarian order. This is the destruction of the individual, the unique beauty of each person. The loss of chaos is the loss of vulnerability and wonder. Too much order is a forces that opposes God as its chief existential threat.
The balance of order and chaos is fundamental to Christian theology and therefore horror should always be a central concept to our understanding and practice of worship. Horror is the an authentic response of faithful and devout spiritual ritual.
Are you bored in church? Tired of the routine? Perhaps you have lost the horror essential to your spiritual practice. It could be time to rethink the design of your weekly liturgy.
Are you afraid? Do you feel out of control and blind walking through the forest alone, hearing whispers of monsters and killers with knives and guns? Perhaps you’ve stopped in the middle of the story. Maybe you need to take a risk, put your hands out, and feel your way forward. The story is not over.
Cancers disappear.
Fathers can leave the hospital three hours after they were lying unconscious on the garage floor.
Girls that were stolen and lost can be found.
Bills will be paid.
Hearts will be healed.
Love will be found.
This is the reason we gather together. To remember both sides of the story.
I’ll leave you with a benediction from John Lennon, who said, “Everything will be OK in the end. If it’s not OK, then it’s not the end.”
*Chaos is the eternal state of disorder. Chaos is what the universe is expanding into. It is the unraveling of space, time, identity, reason, and imagination. Chaos is inhumane and void of life. It is utter destruction and at the same time, utter potentiality. Chaos is the origin of life. In the Genesis narrative, it is represented by the waters above and below. It is deep. In Latin, it is known as “Ex Nihilo” (that’s where the philosophy of Nihilism gets its name.) This is how God creates “out of nothingness.”