What the kids call “spooky season” is upon us, and while some churches are preparing for trunk-or-treat, others are reviewing their arguments against celebrating Halloween. Websites from Focus on the Family to Country Living offer cautious contemplations on the subject (though neither takes a stance in the end) — not to mention countless blogs and church bulletins. A 2006 Gallup poll found that 11% of Americans at the time had “religious objections” to the holiday. It’s worth asking: is Halloween a harmless treat, or the devil’s trick?
The history of Halloween provides ample fodder for both sides. Its predecessor was a pre-Christian Celtic festival, coopted by the Romans in the first century AD. Both iterations had themes of death and dying. In the 700s, a Christian holiday honoring the souls of the departed was moved to coincide with — and perhaps supplant — this festival. In the Catholic Church, October 31 through November 2 are known respectively as Halloween (or All Hallows’ Eve), All Saints’ Day (or All Hallows), and All Souls’ Day. Many other churches, including the Anglican tradition, continue to celebrate All Saints’ Day by honoring the dead.
One can argue that Halloween is essentially pagan, that it is part of a holy triduum, and anything in between. So, what sweet treat might Christianity add to the candy bowl? Memento mori.
As a hospital chaplain, I would struggle not to follow this Latin instruction — loosely, “Remember that you must die,” or, “Keep death in mind.” Though I only do this work part-time, I find no shortage of reminders. As if writing out toe tags weren’t enough, I pass several roadside crosses commemorating lives lost to traffic accidents on my 70-mile route to work. My grandfather has me beat, though: the sleep room used for overnight shifts during his chaplain training was right next door to the morgue.
But day-to-day, we tend to distance ourselves from death. Sure, we watch gory scenes on TV, but we hide our eyes from factory farms and slaughterhouses; we even send many of our elders away to live their final years out of sight. We bill funerals as “celebrations of life,” and in a way, they should be — but it’s all too easy for acquaintances and distant relatives of the deceased to bypass the reality of their own deaths, not to mention the agony of the bereaved. Unlike those who mourned Jesus in his day, we tend to avoid wailing in public.
Christians stand to lose a great deal this way. Anglican author Jeremy Taylor’s great works Holy Living (1650) and Holy Dying (1651), the latter published six months after his wife’s death, demonstrate this well. The first lesson comes simply from the fact that these books are companions. Holy Dying is just as depressing as you would expect, pointing out the ironies of human life and its swift decay: “Before a man comes to be wise, he is half dead with gouts and consumptions, with catarrhs and aches…” — you get the picture.
But the point is not for us to throw our hands up in apathy or despair. Rather, Taylor is warning us not to fool ourselves about the length and value of our lives. Life is too short to waste a moment of it apart from God. Life is deeply valuable — as he outlines in Holy Living, it is an opportunity to grow in our love of others and our love of God, and the Spirit dwells with us even in this ephemeral world. At the same time, our lives are brief and marred by sin. Holy Dying expresses it in a perfectly autumnal line: “Our age is like a fly and contemporary with a gourd.” Thus, “We must look somewhere else for an abiding city, a place in another country to fix our house in, whose walls and foundation is God.”
All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day have the potential to serve as joyful-yet-haunting reminders of what death means for us. On these days, we surely must confront our limits: from dust all of our exemplars and loved ones came, to dust did they return (Gen 3:19), and the same will be true for us. Whatever treasure they had, moth and rust have consumed (Mt 6:19–21) — legacies of love are the only ones that matter. Speaking their names, we hold the cold fact that they are gone in tension with the deeper truth that through Christ, we are now and forever in communion with them. Indeed, we are blessed with not a pantheon, but a communion of saints, a great cloud of witnesses.
Christ’s body, offered at the eucharistic table, redeems the broken bodies of all humankind; thus, all humankind — the living and the dead — is present at the table with us. While the intense intractability of grief makes clear that human love is “strong as death, passion fierce as the grave” (Song of Sol. 8:6), God’s love is stronger than death, and Christ is triumphant over the grave.
The Christian paradox holds sorrow and celebration together. As Paul outlines in 1 Corinthians 15, Christ’s victory both is and is to come. Death as it exists now is not the way God wants it to be; death still stands as “the last enemy to be destroyed” (v. 26). We need not deny our grief nor berate ourselves for missing those we’ve lost. It is holier to grieve in earnest, facing death so squarely that it points one beyond to a God who will raise the dead at the last.
And as for secular spooky season? There’s nothing wrong with dressing up in mockery of monsters, demons, and death itself — Christ gave us bragging rights over them all. Not to mention, even the gloomy book of Ecclesiastes would encourage us to enjoy some candy once in a while (2:24). Rather than squelching the joy of October 31st, it is far better to celebrate the day alongside November 1st and 2nd, with their timeless message: memento mori. As Henri Frédéric Amiel put it, “Life is short, and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind.”
Thank you for this interesting look at Halloween.
👍🏼😊🎃
interesting read,