On Ghosts And Roles

When ghosts are depicted in stories and film, they often continue to do in death the same thing they did in life.

For example, if you visit the Haunted Mansion at DisneyLand, the last thing you see as you go up the escalator is a dead bride standing in her wedding gown. "Hurry back!" She calls out, as if you might miss her wedding.

It's almost like finding a husband was her only identity in life. When eternity stripped her of this task (for certainly the dead become like angels and do not marry and they do not give in marriage) there was nothing else to her. So she continued to wear the gown waiting for an infinitely delayed wedding.

An hour north of where I live there's an excellent magic show my wife and I attended once. The magician was a living, breathing human being, but the pianist was (in the story) a female ghost.

We read about her life on the back of the brochure. Her fiance had hunted foxes, and before he left on what was to be his last expedition she had told him she would sit at her piano and would not stop playing it until he returned.

The fiance had a hunting accident and passed away before he could return home. The young woman continued to play the piano until one day she passed away and (the legend says) she continued her sorrowful songs even in death.

I'm not into ghost stories. They tend to creep me out.

The frightful thing to me is the way the ghosts do not give up their roles. It's almost like they don't know who they are anymore and so they cling tightly onto their job perhaps because that's all there is to them.

"Without the mask, where will you hide?"

There is something about these ghost stories I can relate to. At times I wonder to myself, "What if I lose my job?. What if I don't get accepted to grad school? What if I do something my parents strongly disapprove of?"

These are all questions I have worried about or been tempted to worry over. And they are all role questions. The role of a husband to keep a good job. The role of a student to be accepted into a good school. The role of being a son.

But what about the role of being oneself? Or is that a role?

At the hour when death comes for a person, will they be able to accept themself as they are? Or will they cling tightly to the rules of their role?

When Jesus cast the demons out of a man among the Garasenes, the demons asked to be sent into a herd of pigs.

One could speculate why they made this strange request. Perhaps they desperately wanted to dwell inside something so they won't have to be all alone in who they were. Or perhaps I am mistakenly reading human behavior into the realm of unclean spirits ...

The unclean spirits often use any pretext they can find to be in a person's life. Jesus, on the other hand, stands at the door and knocks. On the one hand we have restless desperation in pursuit of an earthly goal. The other option is to recognize the choice one has in his or her short time on earth.

Jesus described the generation at the time of Noah as people who were marrying and giving in marriage and knowing nothing of what was going to happen to them. They were following their roles in search of distractions -unaware of the judgment waiting for them.

Ghost stories are often based on the lives of people who lived their lives in the words: "If I could just...". And to accomplish their aim they employ calculation, shrewdness, and often times anxiety.

But however often they tell themselves, "If I could just ...", there is one thing the unhappy spirits avoid: accepting themselves as they are. Unlike the world with its fleeting desires eternity asks very little: to love God and to love thy neighbor as thyself.

However urgent a task may seem in this life, it is far better to remember the task eternity has prepared for every person.