Danse Macabre

Beauséant and Buckler—15 October AD 2022

Scripture Passage: “And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now He is God not of the dead but of the living, for to Him all of them are alive.” —Luke 20:37-38

Challenge Message: “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” —Mark Twain

Hallowtide

For 300 years Christianity survived as an illegal religion, sporadically persecuted by the might of the Roman Empire. This meant that a life spent witnessing to the Good News of Jesus Christ often culminated in a brutal and very public death. It’s not that all Christians were killed, of course; but it happened regularly enough, and especially to the most prominent in the community, to affect the entire life of the Church. Indeed, our word for witness, “martyr,” has become synonymous with someone who dies for their faith.

And we had to make sense of it, didn’t we? For 300 years the followers of Christ were crucified, beheaded, lit on fire, and thrown to wild beasts. What then did all this violence and suffering mean to the people of God? Where could we find Christ in this?

Eucharistic celebrations went underground, literally, as Sunday worship took place in catacombs beneath major cities, atop the bones of the martyrs. To this day, many Christian altars look rather suspiciously like sarcophagi. That’s no accident. The Book of Revelation speaks of the martyrs’ souls crying out from under the altar because that’s where their bones were buried (Rev 6:9-10). They often still are in cathedrals today.

From as early as the Acts of the Apostles, we see the believers making a connection between the deaths of the martyrs and the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Scripture describes the execution of St Stephen, our Protomartyr, in ways that quite consciously echo Good Friday (Acts 7). In dying for Christ, Stephen is mystically bound to Christ’s Crucifixion—and thus to His Resurrection, to His own eternal life. As we often say at funerals: Christ has died; Christ is risen; Stephen lives in Christ.

We have accounts of early Christians dipping cloths into pools of the martyrs’ blood, left to coagulate on the arena floor, because they understood it now to be in some sense Christ’s own Blood. If you’ve ever wondered how the Cult of Saints arose in Christianity, it originated here, in the conviction that those who die for faith in Christ are mystically made one with Him, one in His death, one in His eternal life. Indeed, most pre-Reformation church buildings keep death front and center, lots of skulls and skeletons.

Eventually, of course, the ban on Christianity was lifted, and we arose from the tombs. Yet we could not forget 300 years of martyrdom, which had become so central to the Christian experience that now we weren’t sure what to do without it. We had to come up with new varieties of martyrdom to fill the void. If the time of the red martyrs had ended, now surely arose the time of the white and blue martyrs: the white of monasticism, the blue of Christianity in daily acts of faith.

We knew how to die for Christ. Now we had to learn how to live for Him.

Commemorations of all the saints—All Hallows’ Mass—arose immediately following the Church’s legalization, celebrated in different places at different times. These were coördinated and consolidated by Pope Gregory IV into 1 November. Shortly thereafter, related remembrances of the dead were similarly combined into a single All Souls’ Day on 2 November. The preceding evening, 31 October, now became All Hallows’ Eve—Halloween—and together the three days of Halloween, Allhallowmas, and All Souls make up the Hallowtide, our Days of the Dead.

Many have attempted to connect Halloween traditions to pagan precursors, but serious historians have long known that almost all of these are bunk. Hallowtide is a Christian celebration of the sainted dead, and similarities to other festivals of the dearly departed are easily explained by the fact that these likewise take place in autumn, a season naturally associated with death and decay. Japan, for instance, holds the Obon festival for the dead in autumn, utterly independent of Christianity and Celtic paganism.

Much can be said about our love for Halloween; about its cathartic nature, laughing at things that would otherwise scare us; about the jubilant release of a culture-wide memento mori and the healthiness of accepting and preparing for our deaths. But the true spirit of Halloween, in a nutshell, is to dance in the face of death and thereby know what it is to truly be alive. Now what could be more Christian than that?

In Jesus. Amen.