Â鶹ԼÅÄ

Good morning. This year, Halloween follows straight after Divali, the Indian festival of lights.  Where we live in Birmingham, the glitter of last night’s Divali candles will here and there give way to glowing pumpkin heads. Children might swap yesterday’s festive South Asian attire for a spooky Halloween costume. As a Sikh, I wonder how we could embrace this evening to be a ‘hallowed eve’, a blessing in disguise.

Certainly, people will have mixed opinions about it.  As streets become a kind of pantomime stage, complete with supermarket-bought props, you might welcome or dread the trick-or-treaters, frown at the commercialisation of it all and it promotion of superstition and all things morbid. 

Divali celebrates the triumph of light over darkness.  It’s based on a Hindu epic, where the dark force the heros contend with is depicted as the ten-headed king, Ravan.  He was a mighty scholar, so these heads symbolised his formidable intellect as well as the faces of inward compulsions which enslaved him. 

So this week, as ancient epics or eerie tales are told, or as people dress up and enact them, perhaps we can see each shadowy side of the self – be it greed, or some stubborn grudge - as a kind of mirage, whose spell on us can be broken. 

Infinite Creator who is nirbhau, without fear, and nirvair, without vengeance, help us direct our inner gaze to face the light of wisdom.  With darkness dispelled, may we see that the shapes of our fears and grips of our obsessions aren’t so scary or insurmountable after all.