Hallowe’en: reflections on our Christian responses
Philippians 4:8(NRSV)
Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.
Halloween is the festival that christians in the west have come to fight against. It’s because of the hyper-spirituality of it, which I think is ironic but we’ll come to that.
I think I’ve shared this before but it’s such an important story in forming my views on Halloween.
When we were living in Orakei, we took AJ trick or treating with his friends in St Heliers. In a classic case of a parent living vicariously through their children, I opted to help him make a costume of the grim reaper. There he is at 7 years old, going to a halloween party with his friends from swanky suburb of st Heliers. They were dressed up as Jedi, cowboys, superheros: defenders of life. As they set out going around the houses, apart from one or two white sheeted ghosts AJ was the only one that rather than being the hero defending life, was the very one that would take it. The contrast was striking.
At the end of the party we went back to Orakei where we were nestled among state housing. The kids there were dressed up as zombies and monsters going around roaring at each other at the top of their lungs.
The divide in privilege was certainly illustrated by these two attitudes to halloween.
The history of halloween is not uncommon knowledge now so I won’t go into it in detail except to say that it really is important in assessing what a christian response to this might be. I want to suggest that the current christian allergy to it is inadequate. Light parties and hero parties in and of themselves are fine. But I do challenge the implication that we should steer away from the scarier aspects to just focus on light and goodness. Eliminating a public space to daylight our fears and darkness is unhealthy and also, dare I say it, hypocritical.
The first reflection is that it wasn’t until recently that living through the winter was actually a scary proposition of life and death. Uninsulated houses, crippling cold nights, darkness for up to 20 hours which would severely limit the amount of productive work one could do. To pre-empt this with a ritual seeking blessing seems a natural and important thing to do. To build in the sense of connection with those that have passed made sense. They created a night where the liminal space was opened, a bit like pulling the blinds to half open. The boundary between the spirit space and the corporeal space would be softened and space was opened to confront that fear of mortality and all that goes along with it.
We forget today how people would recover from even basic injuries quite differently without antibiotics, setting bones in casts, reconstructive surgery. Healing from infections would likely leave massive scars. Diseases like leprosy would disfigure people, teeth would rot and fall out, the pale irises of untreated cataracts and scars from battle wounds would be present. So the zombie look is probably not as outlandish as we might think.
So we would reckon with our mortality and less that perfect selves, and take time to remember those who have passed with a deep sense that it could be our fate too.
It made sense to mark this at the end of the harvest when there is spare stock to sacrifice and feast with.
The second reflection is that it’s probably not helpful to eliminate what we might call evil or horror from our public discourse. Pākehā may not have the same sense of the liminality of Samhein (pronounced Sawin), given our post-enlightenment scepticism of the traditions, but in a sense that’s to our detriment. One of the critical disconnects between European colonisers and the Māori world view was in how Māori invoked the presence of their tipuna, their ancesters all the time. A person is the current instance of their whakapapa, and that accountability to the past is what determines the character of someone in the present and the future.
This was misconstrued by pākehā as evil and ungodly because they thought it echoed their own European ancestral worship which the church frowned upon.
You’ve often heard the phrase, “we look to the past in order to see the future”. Påkeha tend to take this as looking at history. Māori take this as looking at whakapapa which is more than just history, it’s the whole story of people and land that has been shared through generations.
A third reflection is that the characterisation of evil in halloween is such a blatant lie that if we aim to disengage with it then we give it the credibility it doesn’t deserve. Evil is not zombies, ghouls, monsters and ghosts. Evil lies in the character of our conduct and the institutions/structures and power that is wielded in those spaces. The overblown characterisation of possession in the Exorcist is a massive distraction from the evil that perniciously operates under our very noses. If we think we are being pious and godly by spurning those movies we think we are standing for piety, we are wrong. What are we actually doing about the stuff that’s genuinely promoting injustice, dehumanisation and othering of people?
We might steer our children away from that imagery but the other 364 days of the year they hear the news. A couple of weeks ago there were two suicide attacks on mosques that were the equivalent size of the Christchurch massacre. If seeing people dressing up as zombies offends our sensibilities more than the actual bloodshed in our papers every day, then it seems our priorities are wrong. I other words, by describing horror using fantasy imagery, we are misdirected from the actual horrors in this world.
The last reflection I offer is that being afraid is not evil as such. It’s actually a very natural aspect of being human. Fight or flight mechanisms are at play here: we are being warned of potential lack of control of a situation. It can be exhilarating when we face our fears because whilst they’re reasonable at times, sometimes they need to be overcome and challenged.
By creating taboo, we actually end up suppressing things which inevitably will crop up. As we distance ourselves from horrors we create an image of hope and God’s blessed life based on the absence of these things. And when they come we have no context for them.
Furthermore, if we create a paradigm where evil is closely connected with fear, then we will not recognise that evil is present all around us and that we might be actively engaged in it—but because it’s not scary, we don’t pay attention.
These are some thoughts for conversation. Facing the darkness by lampooning it is actually not a bad thing. Processing a difference between rational fear and irrational fear is helpful. Understanding God’s involvement in those spaces helps us reconcile it. Breaking down the taboos may be helpful for processing the very real horrors in life and give balance to a vision of christian life that it’s all about happiness.