Disciples, Apostles, and Saints!
An evening most associated with spooks and candy, with dressing up and scaring each other, Halloween is also treated by some parts of the church as outside the tradition and evil. Which is why you might be surprised to learn that it comes from inside the tradition and is anything but evil.
Halloween, or Hallowe’en, is a shortening of All Hallows’ Eve: the evening before the day we used to call All Hallows’ Day and now call All Saints’ Day. That is the day we honor all of the saints who have come before us. The tradition, then, of beginning the celebration the night before (like Christmas Eve), of preparing ourselves for remembering and honoring the dead goes back centuries.
Even the delight, the fun of dressing up in spooky costumes, of haunting, of bringing a bit of holy fear for the fun of it is traditional. We do this because our tradition encourages us to lose our fear of death. We are called, instead, to see death as a turning point more than an end. That we might proceed from life to death and then into new life.
Our traditions are full of this same imagery, most notably baptism, which uses that same linguistic turn of phrase. We name the ending of one life and the beginning of a new one.
We might see Halloween, then, as a bit of mockery of the macabre and delight in the taboo so that we might better know what it is to live a life of grace and appreiate the love of those who came before us.
With love,
Drew+
