Halloween
After the seriousness of the article from last month, you the reader deserve a lighter subject for consideration.
One might say that “All Hallows Eve” is a confusing holiday/holy day. Yes, Holy Day. The word “hallow” in Halloween means to make holy. Like Christmas Eve is the evening before Christmas, All Hallows Eve (Halloween) is the evening before All Saints Day.
I’m guessing that one reason we don’t celebrate Halloween with a worship service is that the common practice today is to move All Saints Day to the Sunday immediately following October 31st. Another reason is the candy and “trick or treating.”
In the early church, the Christian Mass was not only celebrated on Sundays but was celebrated during the rest of the week, but especially on designated feast days for designated saints of the church. For example, the feast day for St Francis of Assisi is October 4th, and Saint Bruno is the 6th ( the feast day for St Harvey is June 17th). Not every day of the month is designated as a feast day, but most days are.
In the Catholic Church, there are specific requirements to be named a saint, one requirement being dead. In the Lutheran Church, all believers are saints. Martin Luther said that because of the grace of God, while we are sinners, we are simultaneously saints at the same time.
So, November 1st is designated as All Saints Day; a Mass on this day would pray for and celebrate all the Saints. But…
Halloween/All Hallows Eve happened to coincide with the pagan Celtic people’s celebration of Samhain. Samhain was the Celtic New Year’s Eve: a time to ward off and frighten away evil spirits. In the Celtic religions, this was the night when the spirits of the dead were supposed to visit their homes. The concept of dressing up in costumes to frighten away the evil spirits arises from these pagan superstitions.
If you get a chance, do an internet search and listen to the symphonic music of “Night on Bald Mountain” by Mussorgsky. The music is a tone-poem of Halloween with images of spirits and spookiness on the mountain that are dispersed by the rising sun at the break of day.
The origins of Halloween are a mixture of both the holy and the pagan. But today, Halloween is the inspiration for a lot of great music and a reason for lots of family fun with the costumes, parties and candy.
–Pastor Harvey
