#The Return Of The Pagan Holy Roller

[deaverypriest]

Love (20Seventeen)

From ev’rything u read And ev’rything u see It is easy 4 one 2 reason That Love is absent That Love is on the run From Anger, Pride, and Fear That Love has abandoned us (2 a dire Fate, a loveless State) And her daughters, Mercy and Grace, are not here But lo, a jug tips              a pantry door opens And Love, barely draped, skips (Thru a garten of planets and stars) A chain of flowers Above her hips The scent of lilac Behind her ears And across her lips © The Herder, 20Seventeen

[faithisaverb]

A Christian Defense of Halloween

Today is Halloween, which is probably my second favorite holiday after Christmas.  I have loved it since I was a kid.  I loved dressing up.  I clearly loved getting candy.  I loved being spooked (different than being scared).  I would say being spooked is akin to riding a roller coaster:  you are frightened a bit, but in a safe way that never really puts you into actual danger.  It is meant to be exciting and not damaging.  Some scary things are meant to actually harm you, to make you feel unsafe with the world and the space you are in.  That is different than getting spooked.  There is some of that at Halloween, but by and large, this is a time for us to have fun. My parents were fine with Halloween, so I never thought it was an issue growing up.  I grew up in the church, so I just assumed that this was not something that was in any way at odd with being a Christian.  It wasn’t until I got into upper elementary school that I started to hear people in the larger church saying that Halloween was celebration of evil, and therefore unacceptable for Christians. This is a thought that has permeated the culture more and more in the past few year, especially among more conservative Christianity. I would defend against the notion that Halloween is evil.  There are certainly aspects of Halloween that go too far, but the same is true for nearly every holiday (Thanksgiving can steer into gluttony, Christmas is deeply associated with commercialism, Independence Day can encourage jingoism, etc.). The lost aspect for many opponents of Halloween are the Christian roots in the celebration.  The two prevailing thoughts of the origins of Halloween are either that it was purely a Christian holiday of All Hallows’ Eve, preceding All Hallows’ Day, or that it took the Gaelic pagan holiday called “Samhain” and Christianized it into a holy day (All Hallows’ Day/All Saints’ Day) much in the same way that Christmas was placed near the pagan celebration of Saturnalia on the winter solstice.  The early church had placed some of these feast days near the old pagan celebrations to try to work with the pagan converts from within their culture, pulling out the elements of these holidays that we worth uplifting – helping to let the pagans know that God had been with them all the time, and that there was at least partial value in their former celebrations, which now had new focus. The celebration of All Hallows’ Day was a celebration of the church triumphant, that the power of God was known in the Body of Christ which transcends time and space – that Christ was celebrated through all those who had been in the church at any time.  This was a focus on the power of God through the church, and that nothing can stop that, no evil could overcome it.  As a response to this, people started to think of the night before this day celebrating the power of God through the church as a time where evil made a last ditch effort to try to convince the world that evil might win (which Scripture tells us definitively: it won’t), or the last chance that evil has to “come out to play” before they are shown to be powerless on All Hallows’ Day. Think of it as Fat Tuesday before Lent starts on Wednesday, as one last chance for debauchery before the penitence of the Lenten season.  

A practice that came out of this was dressing up as evil spirits, not to celebrate them, but to hide from them.  If you were going out, you didn’t want them to know that you weren’t a spirit, so you would disguise yourself.  Eventually, as people trusted more in the power of God over the power of evil, people moved from dressing up as evil spirits out of fear to dressing up as evil spirits as a form of mockery.  The faith in the power of God over that evil was signified by turning those images of evil into something that is ridiculed rather than feared.  Thus, the holiday was never a celebration of evil, but rather a mockery of it in the face of the power of the Body of Christ. Moreover, Halloween arguably retains less pagan imagery than either Christmas or Easter.  Christmas has yule logs, Christmas trees, mistletoe, glass ball Christmas ornaments, and other symbols that were explicitly pagan symbols that were Christianized and turned into a celebration of the Christ mass.  Easter has bunnies and eggs, both signs of the pagan celebration of fertility that comes with the vernal equinox, and even the name “Easter” refers to the Germanic god “Oester,” the god of fertility. These images again were Christianized and now point people toward the resurrection of Christ, and no longer have any connection to the pagan celebrations of fertility and the spring renewal. No one is seriously advocating the removal of Christmas trees or Easter eggs.  We have made a comfortable transition to letting those images become Christianized.  Yet we struggle with Halloween, which had greater roots in Christianity since its inception. Knowing this, we can look at Halloween as not a celebration of evil, but a celebration of the power that defeats that evil.  It is not a time to be afraid, but a time to celebrate where there is nothing to fear.

As churches try to create alternatives to Halloween and “safe” places for “fall festivals,” we are implying that there is something to fear, not only in the holiday of Halloween, but in the communities that we live.  As churches continue to try to separate ourselves from the culture, we are also separating ourselves from our neighbors and from our communities.  This is not what God has in mind for us. Halloween is a time to celebrate that we are free from evil’s grasp.  It is also the one holiday that encourages us to celebrate with our immediate community, to go to the doors of our neighbor’s house, to share our joy and creativity with them, and to have them offer us a tiny piece of joy in return.  The one time I really see everyone who lives on my street is on Halloween.  I would never know this if I was too afraid to participate. As you go out tonight, keep these two sentiments in mind – “Where oh death is now thy sting??” (my favorite taunt against the power of death that we shout at Easter) and “love your neighbor.”  We are called to be in community, and we are called to live free from the fear of death.

Enjoy your community, and celebrate Christ’s victory over death.   And get some candy. Happy Halloween, everyone! *Thanks to Laura Bentley for a conversation that prompted this post.