Dancing with Death

Pastor’s Epistle—October 2021

I spend most of each year looking forward to October. It is a liminal space, a time of transitions, between summer and winter, darkness and light, life and death. Everything is apples and spices and smoke on the breeze—rich, warm, fiery colors blazing out from the midst of shadows, covering every tree branch, every surface on the ground.

The things we never talk about all come out to play: the dark things, the scary things, exciting things. We speak of the dead and of devils, of witches and fairies, of the dangers of strangers who lurk down the street. Yet it’s all in good fun. It’s all costumes and candies and films that would fright.

As a child it’s wickedly delightful to take on some powerful new identity and run through the night, demanding sweets from adults and accruing entire sackfuls of candy. The world is turned deliciously upside-down. And as parents, having children of our own, we can return to that more innocent age, walking our little monsters from door to door, remembering costumes they’ve forgotten from years gone by.

Each October you’ll hear the usual tale of how Halloween is some ancient pagan Celtic festival: how the denizens of the Otherworld would pierce the veil to visit the living this one special night; how we piled up bonfires and donned strange costumes to keep the spirits content and at bay. And then there will be the smaller yet more ardent number of online rebuttals, mostly by clerics such as myself, insisting that Halloween is a Christian holiday, after all, and all this pagan nonsense is modern hokum and bunk.

And honestly, the older I get, the less I care. My roots are Celtic and Christian; I win either way. It is true that most of our Halloween customs are shockingly modern—decades old, rather than the centuries or millennia some might claim. And it is also true that the Celtic festival of Samhain (probably) predates the coming of Christianity, even if the churchmen who established the Hallowtide in Italy made little note of whatever it was that the Irish were doing out there at the edge of the world.

The past, alas, is largely lost to us. What we have are stories and interpretations. And we must all admit that from North America to Japan, every culture that knows autumn knows an autumn feast. Quite naturally, the themes of such feasts will echo and overlap: themes of harvesttime, of deepening darkness and oncoming cold, of death and livestock slaughter, and of fires in the night.

Some argue the eldest religion is the cult of ancestors, the Cult of Saints: the cult of those who’ve gone before us into that unknown country, yet whose spirits linger on with us, remembered and beloved. It is only natural that we honor our forebears in both family and faith. For Christians this takes on an unusually surprising and scandalous merriment, for we know that death has been defeated, that hell has been harrowed, and that heaven has been opened up to all of humankind.

Christ has conquered death for us. What more have we to fear?

A line I read now years ago has stayed with me all this time: that the essential spirit of Halloween is to dance in the face of death, and thereby know what it is to truly be alive. Now you tell me: What could be more Christian than that?

Happy Halloween. In Jesus. Amen.