Today is Halloween and I bet you are all wondering how Halloween and Inspirational Sunday have to do with each other. I guess I would question my sanity too but when you no longer have children and don't yet have grandchildren, Halloween is a fun day. It brings reminders of past Halloweens and trying to judge the weather in picking a child's costume and be prepared to switch if either the Chicago weather turns hot or becomes snowy and cold. Yes, either happens in Chicago. The above picture is of my granddoggies - Brit is on the left dressed as a gladiator while Bella is on the right dressed as the Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland.
Halloween is actually considered All Hallow's Eve. It has grown into a major secular holiday in American culture. The purpose behind it has been lost - kinda like celebrating New Year’s Eve without a New Year’s Day. Take away the saints and our beliefs about the dignity and destiny of human beings, and the only thing left is pre-Christian superstition regarding the dead.
There is a belief among many that Halloween has come to signify evil. In reality, Hallow means holy and e'en means evening. So the word Halloween is a shorted form of All Hallow's Eve or the day before All Saints Day. Halloween can be a way for us to deepen our understanding of our faith.
Until the ninth century the Church celebrated the popular feast of All Saints on May 13th, during the season of joy after the Resurrection. This is the light in which we see all the faithful who have died, especially those whose witness to Christ is an inspiration. In 835 the date was deliberately changed to November 1 to Christianize the existing pagan time for remembering the dead—to bring light to the darkness, and hope to the most basic of human fears.
Before canonization was ever thought of, before the New Testament books even took shape, the human desire to remember deceased loved ones surfaced. And these were no ordinary loved ones, these were brothers and sisters who had died in Christ, as witnesses to Christ. (The Greek word martyr simply means "witness.") Their death was victory, not defeat; celebration, not mourning.
Today’s Christians sometimes forget that by the time of Christ many Jews, especially the Pharisees, had a well-developed belief in the resurrection of the dead, which included trust that the prayer of the living could benefit the dead. It was with this understanding that, 160 years before Jesus was born, Judah the Maccabee prayed and offered sacrifice for dead comrades who had sinned: "For if he were not expecting the fallen to rise again, it would have been useless and foolish to pray for them in death" (2 Maccabees 12:44).
For the first 1,000 years of Christianity there was no collective memorial for All Souls. Relatives and loved ones were remembered at Mass on the anniversary of their death, or until they passed out of living memory. But by the seventh century monasteries were celebrating an annual Mass for all the deceased of their order, an idea which spread to the laity. About 1048, an influential abbot chose November 2 to commemorate All Souls because it was an obvious companion date and extension of the Feast of All Saints. Both days are reminders that all of us, living and dead, are united in a living communion with Christ and one another.
So in effect, Halloween became one vigil for two feasts celebrated by the whole Church. Kids are more likely to excitedly put on ghoulish makeup to get ready for parties or trick or treat. Their instincts are right: Skeletons and jack-o’-lanterns and shocking costumes are very much a part of All Hallows Eve. It’s the adults who shy away from eyeballing their own mortality. The kids are right. Death is not cute. Halloween began with martyrs, after all, so strange makeup and skull masks are not out of line.
So how do we separate the symbols of Halloween? Do we stop serving cider and doughnuts because apples were sacred to the Roman goddess Pomona, and doughnuts were once set out as "food" for the souls of the dead (their circular shape indicating eternity)? Of course not. Our gratitude for God’s bounty eclipses all that.
What about trick or treat? In the Middle Ages there was a superstition that those who had died the previous year without being reconciled to you might rise to haunt you, appearing as will-o’-the-wisps or ghosts. Soon those who were living began to use the occasion for reconciliation. To wipe the slate clean for the coming year, they came, masked and unrecognizable, and boldly bargained for treats.
Halloween and its back-to-back feast days mean more than talking about our favorite saints who lived in another time, another place. It’s also an opportunity to talk about what’s needed for holiness now (perhaps even martyrdom now, sad to say). Do we "worship" or "adore" our beloved saints, as some non-Catholics think? Not at all. We honor them and learn from their example; adoration belongs to God alone. We ask the saints to pray for us the same way we might ask a good friend to pray. A favorite quotation about prayer begins, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name" (Matthew 18:20). The "two or three" aren’t necessarily limited to the living. It’s comforting to have friends always available to pray with you, a whole "cloud of witnesses," in fact! (see Hebrews 12:1).
Halloween also invites us to talk openly about death in a culture that labors mightily to deny it. Seventy-five percent of Americans do not have a valid will, much less a Living Will or an organ donor card. "If I die..." people say, instead of, "when I die." Do we think death is optional? Death is a fact of life. When St. Francis of Assisi lay dying he said, "Welcome, Sister Death," recognizing that death was just another creaturely thing in a world that would one day pass away.
Occasionally we must push the "pause" button in our busy lives to consider our own mortality with all its spiritual and practical consequences. The Church gives us two feasts and the whole month of November to do this.
Halloween is like our Mardi Gras before a very serious Lent. We should be able to laugh at the dark side and dress up in costumes and have parties. Let’s reclaim our heritage with all the story power, creativity and joyous good fun that we can. Let’s use it to help us become the saints we are each called to be.
Halloween is a victory celebration, after all!
