All we want for Christmas is to believe in ghosts again…

As a kid I had my own room with a single bed at one end and a door with a light switch at the other.    This is significant because I feared the dark and more specifically, I feared ghosts and even though the distance between my bed and the door couldn’t have been more than two metres…in the dark it felt like crossing the Pacific Ocean. I would turn off my light and then flee like a teenager who had just ignited a home made explosive.

When I think back on it, I can’t work out whether I really believed in ghosts or not. It can’t really have made that much sense to me. I’d never seen a ghost, so I had no reason to believe in them. If they did exist and they were so malevolent that they targeted innocent kids in the dark…did they also have some kind of code of honour that meant that they drew the line at kids who were in bed?

In the end I don’t think I ever really believed in ghosts. I never reasoned my way into and so never reasoned my way out of it. And I think this is the experience most people have. When we are kids we imagine the world is full of dragons and ghosts and monsters and Santa and the Easter bunny not because deep down we really believe it, but because we have an instinct that the world means more than it appears to. We know that darkness and light mean something more than the absence or presence of photons.

As children, the world is charged with meaning…danger and evil and goodness and wonder are everywhere so we try to explain it with ghosts and ghouls and heroes and saviours. As we get older we can no longer maintain the fiction so we give up on it all. This is why we often look back fondly on our childhood imagination…we wish our world could mean as much to us now as it did then. But we accept that it’s over and that the world must become increasingly boring and same-same and we grow old and skeptical and cynical.

But this isn’t just the sad inevitable reality of growing up…it’s a mistake. Just because our explanations are immature, does not mean that we were entirely wrong…just as if you find a foreign coin and guess its’ value incorrectly, it doesn’t mean it’s worth nothing at all.

The Old Christian Poets were those rare adults who outgrew childish reasoning but retained child-like wonder at the world. They knew how to grow old without growing cynical and disenchanted. And their secret was open to all…they believed in a God who big enough satisfy our adult scepticism but who was good enough to fill the world with wonder. When Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote “the world is charged with the grandeur of God” he could do so because he believed in a God who created and sustained all things and who gave all things meaning.

We may outgrow ghosts and monsters but we never outgrow the need for wonder. A world with out God is a world without a deeper meaning and a world that grows old and tiresome.

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