Haunted, Hounded, or Hunted?

Yard art has exploded with witches, ghosts, skeletons, gravestones, spiders’ webs, monsters, bats, and the like. Horror movie promotions are popping up with alarming regularity. Corn mazes and haunted houses are gearing up for another fall with their frightful offerings. Ghostly howls and bewitching cackles fill the air. Even though Halloween is more than a month away, many people are getting into the spooky spirit of the season now. ‘Tis the season of all things haunted!

Ordinary daily life can be frightening enough without the seasonal scary stuff added to it! Pressures, deadlines, expectations, testing, and all manner of stressors can turn a typical Thursday or a mundane Monday into a day-long nightmare. If creditors aren’t hounding us, it’s likely someone else is. Being hounded about something, anything really, isn’t a pleasant experience even if the one doing the harassing claims it’s for our own good. It’s too easy to feel ashamed or resentful or inadequate if the hounding persists. Cracking under the weight of it all, we may feel like howling!

Things that appear to be haunted in celebration of Halloween. We who might be hounded by others of our kind. What about being hunted? Oh, we know plenty about hunting… not only seasonally for deer but also regularly for misplaced car keys or the sock that matches the one in our hand that would complete the pair or the critical memo that we thought was in a stack of papers on the back righthand corner of the desk but has gone missing. We talk about job hunting or house hunting or hunting for the perfect outfit for a special occasion. We search frequently and seek regularly whether we realize it or not. But is there a sense in which we are hunted?

And no, not in the Eric Rudolph kind of way. Law enforcement agents searching for violators of the law happens routinely in our world. So perhaps “hunted” is not the best word to use. Yet if we were to get lost on our way home from the grocery store, who would miss us, come looking for us, try to search for us, hunt for us until we are found? If we lose our sense of purpose in living or wander from one organization to another without sticking with any of them or withdraw from friendships and social activities, who would seek us out, hunt us down in hopes of restoring us to community and even to ourselves? Perhaps there is lostness in all of us which may or may not be detected by others or identified by us. Could there be something in us that yearns to be hunted?