Blog 811 – 10.31.2017

The Monster Mask

I remember back in Middle School, we called it Junior High back then, being allowed to help with props for the yearly Halloween play. It was each year a scary and comical tradition at East Lake Junior High and always featured the popular Halloween song, The Monster Mash, with a great Boris Karloff i.e. Frankenstein impressonator singing, “I see the mash, I see the monster mash…it caught on in a flash.” Today’s title is just a slight twist on that monster mash – The Monster Mask.

https://youtu.be/vNuVifA7DSU

How we love a scary one. I remember standing in a line to go through a haunted house as a young man and there being a tuxedoed Phantom of the Opera or Dorian Gray walking up and back along the line and even though I knew it was a mask it still creeped me out. We all from time to time wear masks. We sometimes refer to them as “our game face.” What is your monster mask? And who are you trying to scare? Yourself? Knock it off, you’re creeping us all out.

There is, I believe, a beautiful and magnificent being residing in all of us. It is particularly in vogue these days to “out the monster” to “unmask the perpetrators.” That is exactly what we should do but truly and that means admitting to ourselves that we have all behaved like monsters at one time or another and worn all kinds of masks, scary and otherwise, to protect us from being hurt by all the other big bad mostly imaginary monsters we perceive in the world.

In the book and movie, The Shack, which I have not quoted in a while, there is a particularly moving scene where Mack, the main character, is reunited with his deceased father who beat him terribly and often as a child, and yes beating a child is abuse. Why, did he do it – because his dad mercilessly beat him. Mack had broken the cycle with his own children but needed to forgive his father to move on to some deeper work he needed to do. It was a very moving moment. Read the book or see the movie through if you haven’t already. Do it again, you will be glad you did.

One of my favorite songs, the Indigo Girls The Power Of Two, says:

“So we’re okay, we’re fine

Baby, I’m here to stop your crying

Chase all the ghosts from your head

I’m stronger than the monster beneath your bed…”

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5UGucaz8iwNX1c3UENWZnMwTUk

Take off that mask. I see the mask, the monster mask. We see the mask but love only sees the beautiful and magnificent being beneath it.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

Spooky isn’t it,

David White