Happy Halloween?
Today is Halloween. Everywhere I go, I bump into fake cobwebs, dangling skulls and carefully branded orange and black products. The UK spends around £450m, and about 17m pumpkins, on this event.
It’s something we’ve all grown up with, but I wonder if you’ve ever stopped to think about what you are joining in with?
Halloween isn’t a neutral festival. In fact, I wouldn’t call it a festival, because that brings to mind festivities: heart-warming celebration, community togetherness, something to look forward to. The sorry fact of Halloween is that the only thing it celebrates is death (skeletons, coffins), fear (spiders, ghouls), and the colour orange.
My local gym has a strapline on the wall about promoting health and wellbeing. And next to that are hanging skulls and cut-outs of ghosts. Has nobody else seen the irony? How can it be healthy for our 21st century society to celebrate the glorifying of death and allusions to being afraid? In fact, by feeding this we are keeping alive an ancient Celtic pagan festival all about fear and baseless superstition.
Celts believed that on the night of October 31 the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred and the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. About 1000 years ago the Catholic church tried to change the trajectory and made 1 November ‘All Saint’s Day’ as a time to honour the dead who had lived good lives. The evening before was known as All Hallows Eve. But even that feels like sticking plaster over a gaping wound.
At root is a human fear. Nobody wants to die without hope, everybody seeks solace that evil and darkness won’t prevail. A majority of people believe in the supernatural, one way or another.
I’m a Christian minister, and I’m convinced that knowing Jesus is the most wholesome, spiritually cleansing choice anybody can make.
The bible says “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”
Don’t collude with silly superstition, don’t be afraid of darkness. This Halloween come close to Jesus who said “I am the light of world.”