Last Sunday, we blessed an eager bunch of parishioners who were looking ahead to today’s evening of Halloween trick-or-treating. We prayed for generosity, and gratitude, and a good haul, bags that were sturdy and the wisdom to reserve a few pieces of candy for those who remained at home.
Halloween is one of our more strange and subversive holidays. I love it for its creativity and the chance it offers for children to defy boldly the fears associated with being out after dark. I appreciate that it provides a chance for communities to practice important values of neighborliness and generosity.
While it wants to be secular and spooky, Halloween, like most holidays, was born from ancient spiritualities predating and including Christianity. Its earliest origins lie in the Celtic feast of Samhain (pronounced Sah-win), held at the threshold of seasons, as the harvest was gathered, and winter anticipated. The feast fell at the mid-point between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. In this thin space, the souls of ancestors and other less benign beings such as demons and fairies, walked among the living.[1] Community rituals with costumes and fires kept the bad spirits at bay.
In the 7th century, Christianity found its way to the vast Celtic areas that now make up the United Kingdom. Appropriating the feast in its own missionary efforts, the church moved its holy day for venerating saints and holy souls to coincide with the Celtic feast. The evening before the Church’s holy day honoring the saints, All Hallows Eve, was the time to merge practices with Samhain festivities.
I’ve always liked this about our religious holidays such as Halloween and Christmas – that rather than replacing or rejecting older customs and beliefs, there was a wisdom in respecting them, in finding ways to understand people who were encountering Christian practice for the first time, and to find points of commonality. I wish that this was the chief value and practice of the church’s evangelical history, but more often than not, it practiced conquest and bloodshed in the name of spreading the faith. As a human institution it still has much to repent of.
Yet I like that Halloween can be a reminder of how our current social reality derives from a long history of cultural merging, comingling, and compromising. At Halloween we continue to find ways to put our anxieties in their place, to laugh at death, to casually put on and take off aspects that terrify. We practice the act of going from fear to courage, of taking risks, of respecting and dancing with darkness.
These are pretty good spiritual practices.
And they play well with our Christian practice of turning to the saints, so many of whom died violent deaths for their faith during frightful times. The everlasting and joyful life of the “saints in light” reminds us that death has been conquered, that it has no sting, as St. Paul says. It allows us to honor the velvet darkness of the night as the result of the good act of creation found in Genesis.
Even more ancient than the feast of Samhain and our own Christian practices is the profound faith found in the scriptures of ancient Israel. I find this Sunday’s passage from the Wisdom of Solomon particularly apt as we prepare for the Feast of All Saints, which officially falls on Nov. 1 and which we’ll celebrate together this Sunday:
“ The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace. … In the time of their visitation they will shine forth and will run like sparks through the stubble.”
Shining forth and running like sparks through stubble. What an apt image for the knowledge that our deceased loved ones and the saints in light are among us in this time of bonfires and shortening days and lengthening nights.
May this holiday, with its joyful dance between darkness and light, be a time for us all to be assured of the power of unending Resurrection life, spent in the presence of a God who has made all things good.
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