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I love Halloween. Well, not all of that slasher movie stuff. But the wonderful sight of children robed in costumes that
let them become their heroes or confront their monsters.
Imagination is a necessary skill for a vibrant spiritual life. And Halloween is a festival for imaginations. Halloween
allows children and adults a safe container to help them deal with death and fear.
November 1 is All Saints' Day and November 2 is All Souls Day in the Christian calendar. These are feasts for us to remember
with thanksgiving those who have died and to commend them in faith to God. The older English name for All Saints' Day is
All Hallows Day. A saint is one who is hallowed, holy and honored. It has long been a tradition to celebrate an evening
office of prayer on the eve major feasts. In this case, All Hallows Eve = Hallow-een.
Child psychologists tell us that children benefit from the chance to acquire a sense of power over some of their fears
by acting them out, dressing in costume as monsters or goulies or ghosties or things that go bump in the night.
I'm a traditionalist about Halloween. I want the children to go house to house scaring us grownups with their fierce
disguises and reaping the generous largesse. It's an empowering experience for kids. It is also a community building evening
when we come out from behind our doors and walls and meet our neighbors on sidewalks and porches.
Halloween allows all of us to engage in an essentially religious activity -- facing our fears of the unknown through symbol
and ritual. Halloween lets us to embrace some of our symbols of death -- ghosts, skeletons, graveyards, and haunted houses.
It helps us confront symbols of evil like witches and monsters and black cats. We bring these repressed fearful things out
into the open, and we play with them in a safe and protected way. Good symbols and rituals allow us to face our fears in
order to be released from them.
On Halloween we embrace the scary parts of life during an evening of fun and community energy, then we safely return to
the normality of our everyday lives. It's an important experience for children. Let them be scary. Let them be safely scared.
Let the unconscious be brought into the light of consciousness. Such is the spiritual journey from darkness to light, from
fear to faith, from bondage to freedom.
There is another social tradition of Halloween that has a different set of religious overtones. Halloween is also a ritual
of reversals. Living people costume themselves as though dead and the dead are thought to walk the earth again. Adults dress
like children and children dress like adults. Serious powerful people become clowns and small anonymous people dress like
celebrities. Three-foot high little creatures boldly knock on doors demanding candy with a threat.
Such breaks in the norms of power have echoes in the great religious literature. The Magnificat is the song the lowly
peasant Mary sings when she learns she is pregnant with a special child. She praises God who "has cast down the mighty
from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away
empty." (Luke 1) Jesus spoke of similar reversals: To gain your life you must lose it. I, your leader, am with you
as one who serves. Blessed are the poor, the meek, those who mourn... He is a convicted criminal executed in public humiliation,
yet Christians point to him as God's presence in human life. Some early graffiti shows a man on a cross with a donkey's head.
Paul called himself a fool for Christ. There is a centuries-old Christian tradition of teaching through clowning.
Religion often uses inversion or reversal to shake us out of our conventional patterns of thought and life in order to
open us to new possibilities. God often becomes real to us through an anomaly that challenges, breaks and reshapes our everyday
paradigms. Religious experience opens the imagination to the possibility that there is more than we are accustomed to. Halloween
can be a rich cultural event that energizes our religious imagination.
So let the children be powerful and fearful as death. We who are grownups need a bit of their child-like imagination
to be fully alive ourselves.
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