Welcoming Halloween
Loving our neighbors and helping our children face the fear of death are among the goods Christians can embrace when we celebrate this autumnal festival.
Jesus may come tommorow night, folks.
Keep those porch lights on, those jack-o-lanterns lit, and welcome the children (and your neighbors) as Jesus would.
In America, Tuesday evening is just about the only hour* left anymore where anyone might come to our door or we might freely go to the door of anyone else (*some cold-hearted municipalities and neighborhood associations limit trick-or-treating to one hour!!).
Don’t turn your porch light off, or leave for the night, or play the part of an autumnal Scrooge. Kids are watching to see if you are a good neighbor. And be generous with the candy!!
As Christians celebrating All Hallows’ Eve, we do not seek to glorify the occult or anything satanic but Halloween (like Ash Wednesday) is a good time for us to let death and other things that scare us into our celebrations and conversations, especially with our kids, especially in a culture that denies death and sweeps it under the rug and keeps it in darkened closets or locked in the attic, the business of morticians and gravediggers, where nobody says a damn thing about it.
That has to change for us to be healthy.
Contemporary America needs something like Mexico’s Day of the Dead and this is as close as we get to one. We can use celebrations like Halloween to help kids overcome their fears because we trust a story of light and resurrection that transfigures and defeats death and darkness.
A child learns by these festivals, as G.K. Chesterton understood, that “limitless terrors ha[ve] a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.”
PS: Yes—I know—Jesus is wearing his Anglo-Saxon costume in the painting.
Here’s a cross-platform link to my all-time favorite pro-Halloween video, an amazing short film about the gospel in light of All Hallows’ Eve that you will not want to miss. Trust me.
I love this so much.
https://substack.com/profile/100124894-steven-berger/note/c-42816212