Meanwhile
Tomorrow in the Church is All Saints Day, once called All Hallows, could be All Holies, as in hallowed be thy Name, your Name is holy. If western culture makes it a fun, chilling, spooky event, All Saints Eve, All Hallows Eve, Hallows Even, HallowE’en, that’s not my problem, nor is it an issue with me if society appropriates any Holy Day to make it its own.
From the Christian calendar society has long done that with Easter and Christmas as major festive and commercial events, and also Halloween; and the Church has turnabout done that with Independence Day and Thanksgiving Day. And our holy Christmas Day was a secular and pagan event that the church appropriated and converted in order to turn attention from its paganism while also taking advantage of an existing fun and loved winter celebration that, because everybody loves a party, could have been difficult or impossible to stop, just as it would now be difficult to stop trick or treating and all the spooky stuff. Halloween itself was a preChristian event of bonfires in the darkness to ward off ghosts, spooks and monsters:
At the moment, remembering the opening scene in the dark, chill and foggy, moonlit garden*, I’m looking at our second reading for All Saints Day, November 1st, which we shall observe this coming Sunday, November 5, and also in some fashion at church tomorrow, Wednesday evening. Grabs my attention from the reading, the line “what we will be has not yet been revealed,” which may mean that when we cease breathing, heart stops, and we pass on to whatever, we don’t know. We may think we know, and the church’s teaching on this has evolved over the ages, and we believe, and we have faith, and we may “know by faith,” and we are not unlikely to confuse faith for knowledge, but we do not know. And we will not know (a word is agnostic, which means not knowing) until we pass through the gate of death. At which point we may know all, or nothing until the Mystery of Faith (Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again) is solved, or, unimaginable for us who cannot visualize our own nonexistence, it may be that we are and know nothing forever.
Meanwhile, faith (Hebrews 11:1 NRSV The Meaning of Faith, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”). Death may be, is, for us the ultimate unmentionable unthinkable, but Halloween, All Saints Eve, gives us opportunity to contemplate possibilities both joyous and unnerving, including that of outer darkness, if we dare.
Meantime, in the midst of things
Help us, we pray, in the midst of things we cannot understand,
to believe and trust in the communion of saints, the forgiveness
of sins, and the resurrection to life everlasting.
1 John 3:1-7
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. 3And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
DThos+
* from The Passion of the Christ