Thank you for joining us!
All right, I’m going to cheat a bit this week.
Normally I would do a Comment Highlight here from Monday’s post, but ALL of your answers to the question What kind of ancestor do you want to be? were SO insightful, moving, and beautiful, that I couldn’t just pick one!
So, I invite you all to check out the answers to Monday’s discussion and—if you haven’t already—feel free to contribute your own reply at any time!
Setting The Table
Hallowe’en has become one of my favorite times of year,
but it wasn’t always that way.
As I’ve written here before, I never really appreciated the nuances of the season until I discovered the deeper foundations of its most famous holiday, and it was a bit of a journey to find my way through these shadowy paths. I’m always learning.
Today, I feel very strongly that there is a firm place in the Christian calendar for an intentional, researched, open-handed relationship with Hallowe’en. And in a time where we are becoming increasingly detached and digital, reconnecting with our roots in this way can be incredibly lifegiving. Turning our backs on it because we fear the darkness ignores centuries of church history and contributes to an unhealthy anxiety around death and grief.
There are ways to travel well through this time.
I want to highlight the work of my fellow Hallowtide evangelist,
, whose recent post delves deeply into the liturgical history of the season and makes a brilliant case for the Christian reclamation of the holiday. There is much to be learned, here, if we put aside our preconceived notions and listen.Most cultures with ancient origins around the world follow some version of the idea that the dead do not truly leave us—especially the ones we loved in life—and certain elements can draw them closer to us.
For the Celts, that belief was seasonal, and we are coming up upon the most famous echo of that idea: Samhain, which is one of the main foundations of our modern Hallowe’en.
Many Christians have the (mistaken) notion that Samhain is a demonic or spiritually bereft holiday with its origins in witchcraft. This is likely because Wicca (a modern religion, invented in the last fifty years) lifted a lot of ideas and names wholesale from ancient Celtic cultures for its own calendar, and invented a few, too. But to the Celts, the term “Samhain” was simply a designation for a season; it signified the end of harvest and ran through the dark months until the early spring warming of Imbolc in February. While there are certainly ancient rites that were practiced around Samhain, some less than savory to our modern sensibilities, the term itself is not evil.
At Samhain (pronounced sow-inn, with the “sow” rhyming with “cow”) the ancient Celts believed that the veil between the world of humans and the world of supernatural beings, including the ghosts of the departed dead, thinned to the point where crossing over was possible, even by accident.
This had both positive and negative consequences. On and around Samhain you had to be on your guard, lest you be tricked and kidnapped by darker spirits who were able to reach out and grab you during this “thin time”.
But on the flipside, you could also feel the love and devotion of those who had gone before you, and you could express your love back to them through various means, including lighting a candle in your window and literally setting a place at your table for them to join you as they passed between worlds.
The dead were seen as a benevolent force, present and ready to help. In his book The Year In Ireland, Kevin Danaher recalls a time in childhood when he asked an old storyteller around Allhallowtide if the man wouldn’t be afraid to enter a haunted house. The old storyteller replied, “In dread, is it? What would I be in dread of, and the souls of my own dead as thick as bees around me?”
Our modern world (and Protestant Christianity) has often focused so much on pursuing both holy and profane ideas of earthly or heavenly success that we have all but learned to ignore death and grief. To our detriment, I think. Because death is an inevitability, and we stand on the shoulders of millions upon millions who have come before us. No one enters life without signing up to be someone else’s ancestor and the next in a long line of descendants. It is part of our birthright.
One should not meditate on death to the point where one forgets to live, of course, but to ignore it altogether is neither healthy nor holy.
As we move closer to Hallowe’en, we are invited to consider what it looks like for each of us to recognize those who have gone before, to set a place at the table for them in whatever way we choose, and to express our gratitude for their lives: their pain, their accomplishments, and the way they loved.
For those of us who are Protestants, this task can be tougher than it is for other belief systems. We are taught, either directly or through implication, not to dwell on the dead. But there is a difference between worshipping ghosts and respecting the legacy of our forebearers.
Where does that line sit? I cannot tell you. It will likely be different for you than it is for me.
But this glorious season of the ever-thinning veil is a profound opportunity to find that line—and those opportunities to reconnect—for yourself.
I share with you below my personal Hallowtide Benediction, the one I often speak over my own Hallowe’en activities. I pray that it serves you well in this season, should you choose to use it.
Hallowtide Benediction
May a place at the table be set
for an earnest conversation with our ghosts.
May the glow of the lights in the autumn darkness
guide us closer to the grace-filled heart of our God.
May the colors of the season remind us
how multi-hued is the love of our Savior.
May the Creator-God bless us and keep us
on this vigil of haws, hallows, harvest, and holiness.
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Sustenance galore! Funny, I just finished reading "Fall's Memento Mori" from Dr. Grace Hamman, circling this same autumnal theme.
As another Protestant, I suppose I've been taught to think on death as death relates to Christ: Paul's "to die is gain," together with our hope that we belong to Christ in death (nicely honed in question one of the Heidelberg Catechism). This is weighing death in view of eternal heaven, which I think is key, but it's not weighing death in terms of those whom we've lost (other than in the context of grieving), which you discuss here. The latter seems a good complement to the former, in that it does not fear death for our loved ones the way we shouldn't fear it for ourselves.
Trust some random Irish man to drag out a creepy turn of phrase if he knows someone’s gonna write it down