One of the greatest symptoms of secularism’s demise of the faith-life of whole societies in our world today is that too many of the people within them become “like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:34) This demise was even taking hold in Jesus’ own day in spite of the fact that the Jewish society of that time was held together by an intricate and fastidious culture of religious institutionalism. You can imagine then how much farther people have strayed in the now time without anywhere near such a firmly entrenched cultural yardstick to help them navigate their life, considering our time is plagued by an immense plethora of choice paths, a melting pot of highways and byways, with all too many in the West having left their faith-roots long behind them in the annals of their family histories. And such melting-pot pop-culture is heading East, and has been for some time now, more particularly so in the post-war era. The immensity of this problem is proportionately gargantuan in comparison to the extent of demise it conveyed in the time of Our Lord, although His cause for alarm and concern was of a most pressing and urgent legitimacy, for being God, He knew the outcome of something before it’s time, which is why again He told the women of Jerusalem to understand the times and the true significance in light of these, of their weeping.
Please forgive me for sounding blunt and iced-over about something that should engender a healthy dose of human solidarity and sympathy alone but this whole terrible tragedy that has besieged these past few days the little district of Itaewon in Seoul, the Capital of South Korea, just goes to show how inadvertantly foolhardy people can be when they celebrate something in the wrong way. Hence the reason for my mixed reaction of both anger and grief.
Halloween is supposed to be “All Saints Eve” and is a sacred Catholic festival traditionally spanning two days marking the commemoration of the martyrs on the eve – 31st October while culminating in the celebration of All Saints Day on the 1st November where the lives of all the Saints – not just the martyrs, are honoured in the Catholic Church. This is sequentially followed by All Souls Day on the 2nd November which is a time set aside in the Church’s calendar to honour and pray for all those who have passed on from this life to the next. Because this is a holy time which also in some ways aligns with the beginning of Advent & the Christmas Season, celebrating these lead-up days ought to be done with reverence and spiritual fervour but the secular world has in many instances appropriated these sacred traditions and turned them into banal excuses for lurid displays of drunken debauchery with an overt emphasis on valorizing the powers of darkness. This is a complete and utter farcical display of insensitivity to the true meaning of such times of year.
The fact that the secular world loves to turn religious festivals into something other than what they originally were designed to celebrate is nothing new. We all know how far things have come in that direction by the way Christmas and Easter have been band-wagoned by the secular world and turned into excuses for extravagant partying and celebrating the time of year without paying any or much attention to the spiritual, religious or original significance for that matter, of the season they go to great lengths in the name of ‘celebrating’.
And again it’s no wonder there are stampedes or crowd-crushes like the one in Seoul recently where people become manic over things that have either next to nothing or very little to do with the occasion they claim to be celebrating. Turning something that is meant to be treated as sacred and celebrated as a kind of solemnity into frivolous revelry is akin to bringing some kind of discord upon yourself because you are not acting in a way that honours appropriately the real reason for the occasion, albeit ignorantly. It’s, I am sorry to say, a foolhardy way of expressing jubilation. That in no way ought to trivialize the loss of life that has happened as a result. Rather, it ought to make us aware of how the seriousness of such a tragedy ties in with the equivalent and concomitant tragedy of our contemporary era that treats the passage of youth and coming of age from adolescence into adulthood as though it is merely a time to go party and do ‘wild stuff’. This kind of secularist approach to transitioning from puberty into adulthood had gained a huge swell in popularity with the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s gaining a foothold and then a stronghold in many societies all across the world. Through such a dangerous experiment in social libertarianism entire populations opened themselves up on a wider-society level to foregoing religious observance and to living life independently of an authentically Gospel-centred barometer of spiritual health, which to a greater or lesser extent intersected with the mental, emotional, and physical health of those who took such a path.
Because I am doing my research for the information on this tragic set of circumstances in real-time, as the story unfolds, I have just learnt that most of these people who were themselves caught up in the Itaewon tragedy are from devout Buddhist backgrounds. It now occurs to me they were probably celebrating the occasion as what they saw to be a contemporary version of the traditional Hungry Ghost Festival, which btw usually coincides with the mid-Autumn festival. Sadly, because of the lack of interfaith sharing between Catholics and Buddhists, there was no true enlightenment on the faith-based similarity or overlap between these occasions. Having grown up with an Oriental background combined with being raised in the Roman Catholic faith myself, I have come to appreciate how these old Eastern traditions albeit somewhat distorted, are still in their own unique cultural way, expressions of how people on earth relate to those in Purgatory and vice versa. I can therefore see how there is an original prototypical thread of commonality running through the two different cultural and religious traditions. The problem of a rampant secularist approach to interpreting the occasion of Halloween highlighted by this tragic event seems to me to stem from a lack of interfaith dialogue in Korean society as a whole and this includes a sparsity of official interfaith dialogue initiatives set up by the Christian Churches, particularly the Catholic Church which celebrates All Saints eve as the vigil of All Saints Day followed then by All Souls, to converse and walk together with Buddhist brothers and sisters in a dialogue of mutual respect and learning. If such an initiative was set up, then an official organizing body for Halloween celebrations could also follow and be managed by representatives of both faith traditions in conjunction with city administrative bodies. This would solve the problem centred around ‘spontaneous celebrations’ leading to population density infrastructural risks.
What gets me is that how could so many people simply want to just become part of a moving crowd that was amassing so thickly for no uniquely special reason or no specific destination to travel to? I mean it’s not really the situation like say, an official event such as World Youth Day in Rio de Jeniro in 2016 where people gathered in a manner that saw them packed rather thickly in their 100s of 1000s on the beach for a very special pilgrimage event and this occasion only happens once every few years in different locations worldwide so you can kind of appreciate the reason for such high crowd numbers and their immense density at that but in a local district of Seoul and in the event of people just going out to dinner or for a Saturday night drink at the pub and then happening to all converge on the same route at the same time in such a never-before-heard-of crowd density, this is totally absurd, especially when you consider there was not one single attraction the entire crowd had come together to witness or to make a special journey to….except for the fact that all the entertainment venues in the area were donning a grossly secularist Halloween theme, there didn’t appear to be one main attraction as such. And although from one of the photos – see last article cited – there does not appear to be a “mania” or reckless hysterium attached to this particular occasion but rather, it just looks like too many people have eagerly packed out one entire section of this location and are jam-packed together like sardines into the whole area and are moving somewhat limpidly up the street, there seems to be a spirit of aimless wandering attached to the crowd to the point that it so earnestly exemplifies the extreme loneliness carried so heavily within by sheep without a shepherd. And besides, when you consider too that the real meaning of Halloween as the eve commemorating Catholic Saints who were martyrs was probably not even consciously present in the minds or hearts of most if not all of those present, such a tragedy is a horrifically trifling way for these people to have had their lives so suddenly and for seemingly no particular reason ended just like that. This is the authentically sorrowful aspect of this whole thing. The youthful exuberance coupled with a spiritual naïvete that in many respects was no fault of their own. No doubt, many of them came from very devout Buddhist families but a great and sadly unacknowledged part of this tragedy especially insofar as media reports go is that such a instance of spontaneous public overcrowding in part resulted from these people celebrating something in a manner that did not honour the real reason for the occasion.
Other Sources:
Tags:
Halloween, All Saints Day, All Souls Day, mid-Autumn Festival, South Korea, Stampede, Inter-Faith Dialogue
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