Fiona told me in September that she would like to be a Bumble Bee for Halloween, well, a Mommy Bumble Bee to be more specific. It wasn’t difficult to find a Bee costume that for all intensive purposes could fulfill the role of a Mommy Bumble Bee. But after purchasing the costume two months in advance I was pretty certain that someday in between Sept 1st and Oct 31st she would change her mind, growing bored of all the potentials and possibilities of being a Mommy Bumble Bee.
Still, it was more than the humor in my daughter’s recent certainty that she would grow up to be a Bumble Bee and the anxiety that I may have just wasted $40 on a Bee costume that would never get used that brought meaning to her Halloween costume choice. You might remember that it had been only a few months earlier that Fiona and I had just barely survived a legendary swarm attack of the Bumble Bee’s grumpy cousin, the Wasps. She must have touched a bush or looked at the nest the wrong way because before I knew it she was covered in a Greenwood Village Gang of Wasps. There they clung, on and under her shirt, just sticking there looking for the slightest excuse to sting her. It was a terrifying experience; one that has haunted her with many future random attacks of phantom bugs and bees.
It is this context of her decision to be a Mommy Bumble Bee that has made me rethink the potential of Halloween not only for our children but also for us as adults. Here is a two year old who was attacked by wicked little stinging bugs who decides that for Halloween (and perhaps for the rest of her life apparently) she is going to be what might be the most gentle and non-threatening of flying creatures, a Mommy Bumble Bee. For me, it’s a fascinating way to imagine Halloween, as a space in which we can look at all the nastiness and evil in ourselves and in the world and imagine a better ‘us.’ To pretend to be the finished product of the person God is molding us to be by reflecting on those persons who have come before us and impacted our lives in ways that connected us to the love and grace of God in ways we had not experienced before. And maybe for this one day, we might let go of all the anxiety and fear that causes us to cling and sting, and be a little bit more like the Mommy Bumble Bee, floating from flower to flower, person to person, peacefully spreading the Light of Christ through labors of love.
1 Corinthians 11:1 reads, “Be imitators of me, as I am Christ.” On the eve of Halloween we remember that we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses; People who we have known and people who we have only read about who have been able to manifest God’s hope for this world through loving action. We are all called to be Saints in this world, believers whose unique call creates pathways for God’s love to live in this world. Like light shining through a stained glass God’s love spreads and magnifies the potential of our actions. And the beauty in remembering our part in this communion of saints is the realization that we are not alone in our journey. That inevitably we will stumble and fall, make wrong turns and lose our way, sting those we love and have stingers to pull out of ourselves, but in all our adventures we can return to the Truth that it is not in our single attempts to save one another or the world that we live most as saints but in our ability to embrace our interconnectedness with God and with one another.
Maybe this Halloween, as we take time to remember those saints whose footprints have molded the shapes of our hearts and reserve a day to make believe the images our lives will take as we experiment with those ways in which God is calling us to live out Her love in the world, we should all dress up as Mommy Bumble Bees, the Saint of the Bees.
