7th Sunday of Luke - Challenges of Halloween
I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:38-39)
Dear Beloved,
Halloween is an eternal challenge for Christians. Whom should we listen: to the people that say Halloween is just innocent fun and eating candy or to the people that disqualify it as a pagan or worse Satanist feast.
In order to clearly understand it is important to learn a bit of history.[1] Halloween has its origins in a Celtic pagan feast that was taking place in the Northern UK and France. The Celts had the belief that life comes out of death and since November was the first month of the winter, the season when al starts rotting and decaying, they were celebrating it with fires and sacrifices dedicated to the God Samhain. They also had the belief that on that night the souls of the dead would come to the houses. The spirits were also hungry and were going to the houses and begged for food. If you would not give them food the god Samhain will play tricks on you. You can probably recognize now the ghost costumes and the trick or treat custom.
The Church tried to counteract this pagan feast by initiating the Day of All Saints which was celebrated with an all night Vigil the evening before and a Mass in the morning. This was called the "All Hallow E'en". Ironically the importation of this celebration in the US in the 19th century linked the pagan ritual with the Christian name naming it Halloween.
A lot of people can argue that this is just some fun for kids that even the people that were doing Halloween when they were kids did not became Satanist and so on. But thinking like this is a big mistake. By choosing to ignore the spiritual danger and tha paganism of Halloween we choose to be indifferent to what is happening around us. We see the horror movies today together with our kids. Horror characters like ghost have found their way into children cartoons. When we go to Blockbuster to rent a movie over half of the movies have death, kill or murder in their titles. There is mass desensitization to the worst things that can happen to us. Why someone would even want to look at some of the realistic murder or torture scenes we see in the modern thrillers?
In a similar fashion why would we want our kids to dress in witches, ghosts, corpses or zombies? Why do we want to have a graveyard on our front porch? I understand this is for fun, I have a sense of humor too, but can't we joke about something else and celebrate life instead of death?
Participating in Halloween and ignoring all the Christian warnings makes us participate in a greater scheme of things, in the secularism and nihilism of our postmodern society. When we say the devil does not exist and that's why we make fun of it, we actually fall into the cleverest trap of the devil. He wants us to believe he does not exist and everything, good or bad comes from God. But this is a plain lie. God is the source of all that is good, He is the Good. We hear it over and over in the Bible in the works of Jesus Christ, we heard it today in the Gospel when He miraculously healed a woman that was suffering from hemorrhages for many years and he resurrected the daughter of Iair. God is the source of life, not of death. Life comes from Life not from death as pagans say. Christ brought us resurrection. Death is the consequence of submission to sin, death is an irregular state of man. Man was created with a potential of immortality and he blew it himself by listening to the devil and getting away from God, the source of life.
We have the same potential today as Christians, as Orthodox Christians, to achieve this state of immortality in the life after this, united forever with God the Father as brother of Christ in the Holy Spirit. This is the true life we should be working for every day. This should be our focus. Death should not scare us in the sense that we are going to loose what we have here on earth, death should scare us only because we are going into the next life, into eternity with a baggage full of sins, unrepented of our wicked ways, not ready to spend a life with Christ. Life and death are serious issues, not laughing matters. If we are serious of our salvation we should also be serious about what's going on around us and recognize the things that have the potential to harm our souls.
Our Church celebrates the reposed and prays for them. We have special Saturdays when we celebrate Liturgies for our departed brothers and sisters; we have memorial services and so on. These are occasions of community prayer for the salvation of the people we commemorate during these services. In the Romanian Church there is a tradition during singing of Memory eternal when the kolyva is lifted by the priest and family and all the people in the Church join by touching the person in front of them. So the whole church sings memory eternal in full communion, body and spirit, symbolizing all the Universal Church that prays for the souls of the departed. It is a touching experience that expresses the attitude we should have for the souls of our departed brothers and sister. Not dressing like ghosts or troubled souls, but treating them with respect and heartfelt prayer.
We should stop letting our secular life dictate everything for us: what we believe, what we eat, how we dress, what we do and so on. We should be Christ centered not world centered. We have to stop let the sport schedules, TV programs and secular celebrations run our lives, but rather observe the ecclesiastical calendar and make our live gravitate around it. All of you know that Halloween is on the 31st of October and some are even preparing parties for it, but how many of you look at the calendar and say: we are celebrating a Paraklesis that night at 6, this is more important. How many say we celebrate St. Nektarios next week let us try to make it to the Liturgy. Who's Saint Nektarios anyway?
We are so busy to collect more and more things everyday and to fill our lives with cheap entertainment, that God is squeezed at the periphery and He, the Creator of the Universe becomes a nice to have not a must have. We barely give him 30 minutes on Sundays when we come usually late and expect to receive communion as it is our God given right. We have to stop thinking that Christ we'll save us no matter what we do. This is another trap of the devil. Christ will save us, but He wants us to participate in our salvation, to be responsible, to take the important matters of life and death in our hands.
I'll leave you meditating at the priorities in our lives, both as individuals but also as a Church, asking you to ignite in yourselves the spark of metanoia, an old Greek word that means a fundamental change of our old way into a new one, centered on Christ and our salvation. Amin
[1] http://www.allsaintsofamerica.org/orthodoxy/halloween.html