The Halloween Files (Part I)

next >>

Yesterday I saw the first Halloween decorations on display in our neighborhood. The door of a house around the corner was sporting a ghostly rubber skeleton in a tattered white robe, the lawn of another house down the street was cluttered with a variety of kitschy plastic tombstones, and from the porch across the way, a ghastly deaths-head glowered down on passers by with flickering red eyes .

‘Tis the season.

Personally, I’m ambivalent about Halloween. On the one hand, I see problems with its historical ties to paganism and the occult, its celebration of violence and its glorification of gore. On the other hand, there are things in the Halloween tradition that inspire me to think about my faith more deeply: the questions it asks about “Hallowed-ness” (the sacred and the nebulous), its tenuous connection to All-Saint’s Day, the way it taunts a death-denying culture, for just one night, with the knowledge that we are, after all, mortal.

My wife is less ambivalent. Because of all the problems listed on the one hand, she’s always held Halloween at arm’s length. We had some friends who had immigrated to Canada from South Africa and they were absolutely mortified the first time they encountered a real Canadian Halloween.  This community wide celebration of witchcraft and death was baffling and disturbing to them.  My wife has tended to share their opinion.

For my part, like I say, I’m not sure; but one of the things I am sure of, is that there’s always more going on in the most commonplace trappings of our culture than meets the eye; and it seems to me that if there ever was a cultural trapping that could challenge us to think about the intersections between secular culture and Christian spirituality, it’s the strange stuff that takes place on the night of All’s-Hallowed-Eve.

All this is my way of introducing a series I’m working on for October here at terra incongita. Through the month of October we’re going to be spending some time exorcising my Halloween demons (so to speak) and analysing the theological significance of this most-secular-seeming tradition of Canadian culture.

I hope you’ll join us for the trip. And as we’re packing our bags, let me suggest a few more reasons why Halloween is worth some careful Christian scrutiny.

1) It provides a good primer on the Christian Worldview.  Buzz-Light-Year costumes and pillowcases full of candy not withstanding, Halloween actually asks some pretty significant questions about the veil between the material and the spiritual, and whether or not its as solid as we usually like to think.  Historical Christianity has always held that the veil between the material and the spiritual is made more of gossamer than pall, and that things like angels and demons and miracles and the "supernatural" are closer and real-er to us than we know (and not something you'd ever want to triffle with).  Reflecting on Halloween, then, helps us ask some important questions about how Christian our Worldview really is.

2) Halloween is one of the last community traditions we have.  When else does your neighborhood throw a huge block party and hand out goodies to all the kids? In this it can’t be avoided. It’s like voting: even opting out is significant form of participation, and the way Christians participate inevitably says something about our posture towards the community in general.

3) Theological reflection on Halloween is good practice for theological reflection on culture in general. The Christian faith actually takes the themes of Halloween more seriously than the even monster-garbed kids counting their candy afterward do, so no matter how we participate in it, we need to do things like: read culture through theological lenses, and weigh cultural practices against our Christian convictions, and make faith-shaped decisions about our role (as salt and light) in culture as a whole. This is stuff, actually, that Christians ought to be doing on a regular basis about more regular things than Halloween night (retirement investing, drinking coffee, driving cars, recycling, sexual ethics, the list is endless). Halloween, it turns out, is a good, low-stakes training ground, to develop these skills.