A Light to Guide Us Through the Darkness(a sermon delivered at the East Aurora Unitarian Universalist Church on October 30, 2005) As an adult, Halloween has become my favorite holiday. Sure I loved the candy as a kid. In fact, I’m a recovering chocoholic to this day. Well, that’s not exactly true. I’ve never even tried to recover. I love chocolate, and the prospect of getting free candy from all the neighbors definitely appealed to me as a child. But, as an adult, I came to love the pageantry of this holiday. We have more Halloween decorations stored in our basement during the year than Christmas (or what we like to call Yuletide) decorations. And I spend a lot of time each October setting them up and getting them just right. But, like every other holiday in this modern day, Halloween has become commercialized to the point where the actual meaning has been forgotten. Heck, I walked into Wegmans two weeks ago to find a huge Halloween display with candy, plastic pumpkins, and all manner of decorations sitting right next to another huge display filled with wire mesh reindeer, pre-decorated trees and fake snow. It seems the holiday marketing machine begins earlier and earlier every year. But when Halloween began over 2,000 years ago, it had much deeper meanings. Yes, you heard me correctly. The roots of Halloween go back just as far if not further than that birthday many of us celebrate in December. Whereas Christmas celebrates a famous birth, Halloween was a day to remember and honor the dead. You see this is the day when the barrier between the two worlds becomes permeable; when the dead walk the earth once again. Of course it wasn’t called Halloween until centuries later (when the holiday had become invariably entwined with the Christian religion), but the idea of marking the day when the veil between the land of the living and the land of the dead is at its thinnest has been around for far longer than most people realize. Called Samhain, November 1st is a cross-quarter day – the day equidistant between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice. It was and is a Celtic day of rituals and feasts, and one of the most important days of the year to the pre-Christian religious folk of what we now call France and the British Isles. Samhain was the Celtic New Year celebration. Just as they marked the beginning of each day at Dusk, so to did they celebrate the coming of the dark months as a new beginning, as a day to commemorate the passing of another year and light the way home for those members of the family who had passed on during the previous twelve months. Many of the Halloween rituals we observe today began with the Samhain ritual. But as with all rituals, they had deep spiritual meanings once upon a time that have been all but forgotten in the revelry of our modern celebration. The Celts believed that the spirits of those who had died during the previous year became restless on the night of Samhain. Perhaps it was believed this was the time for the spirits to pass over to Summerland – one version of the Celtic hereafter where it was always summer and never winter – or to Tir n’a Nog – the Irish afterlife where spirits lived their lives backwards until they were young enough to once again be reborn. Perhaps the spirits were kicked out of the woods by the evil spirits who also were believed to roam that night. Or perhaps our dead ancestors merely wished to come home to provide some insight into the coming dark months. Whatever the case, the belief that ghosts roamed the fields and streets this night was central to the rituals of Samhain. First of all, people hollowed out turnips or gourds and then placed candles inside to help guide the friendly spirits home or to their final rest. Some gourds, it is believed, were painted with scary faces to ward off the evil spirits. Revelers would also dress up in animal skin costumes or paint their faces before leaving the house in order to fool those same evil ghosts. Some histories of Samhain report that treats were left outside the door for the fairies -- mischievous spirits who would play tricks on people and had to be bribed to stay away. This seems a little too pat an explanation for our modern trick-or-treaters, and my belief is that his tradition came later as the Catholic Church co-opted Halloween into All Saints and All Souls Day in the form of soul cakes which were given to the church or the poor to help buy a loved one’s way into heaven. The central ritual of Samhain, though, was the bonfire. A large bonfire was constructed in the middle of a village and animal sacrifices were thrown in. In fact, if you look at the etymology of the word bonfire, you begin to realize how pagan a concept it is. A Bonfire is quite literally a bone fire. So, the entire town would gather to watch the bones burn. Some believed that the spirits entered the fire, and if you stared into the blaze, the future might be revealed. At the end of the ritual, each household took part of the blaze back to their own hearth to light the coming darkness from the embers of the Samhain bonfire. Throughout the centuries, the traditions of Samhain were melded with traditions from those who conquered the Celts. First, the Roman festivals of Feralia and Pamona were incorporated into Samhain. Feralia was the Roman day of honoring the dead and doesn’t seem to offer anything new to the Samhain rituals. But Pamona was a harvest festival, and this Goddess’s symbol was the apple. It is believed by many that the tradition of bobbing for Apples came from here. After the Romans came the Catholic Church, and this is where the story of Halloween truly begins. The Catholic Church has a long history of winning over pagan peoples by co-opting their ritual days and this day was no different. All Saints Day was named by Pope Boniface IV as a day to commemorate the saints. Two hundred years later, Pope Gregory decreed that All Saints Day would occur on November 1 and that it would be celebrated with bonfires, parties, and people dressed up in costumes of saints. All Souls Day was later added on November 2 as a day to honor all of the dead and not just the saints. Men would go door to door to collect food for the poor and those soul cakes I mentioned were given to these beggars as a way of proving the worth of a dearly departed in the eye of the lord – or more importantly, the Church. Thus the rituals of Samhain were repackaged and given Catholic sanctioning. It worked quite well, as the popularity of Halloween in the U.S. is widely attributed to the influx of Irish Catholics during the great potato famine. Those same Irish, who long ago believed in Tir n’a nog and celebrated Samhain brought their gourd carving, mask wearing, cake begging holiday to the new world as part of their two Catholic holidays, which had been combined into All Hallows mass. The evening before, the night formerly known as Samhain, was, of course, All Hallow’s Eve. The rest is, as they say, history. Now, Halloween isn’t the only ritual that honors the passing of the dead. While researching the history of Samhain, I found several other interesting death rituals. Japan has the Obon festival. This annual Buddhist ritual takes place over several evenings in July. Participants hang paper lanterns in the cemetery to help guide their ancestor’s spirits back to the family tomb. Sound familiar? In China, there is the Moon of the Hungry Ghosts. This month long festival takes place in August and September during one long lunar month. At this time, it is believed that ghosts roam the countryside. Small fires are placed by the roadside where people can burn money and make offerings to appease the spirits. The Italians, Spanish, and Mexicans all celebrate versions of the Fiesta Dei Morti. This day, which I’m sure not coincidentally is celebrated on or near November 2nd, is one of remembrance and prayer for family members who have passed away during the previous year. The most interesting tradition involved in Fiesta Dei Morti is one where the children write notes to their dead relatives, requesting presents or treats. In some versions of the tradition, the notes are placed in shoes the night before, and the treats are left behind by the wandering spirits during the night for the children to find in the morning. Halloween as Christmas. I do like the sound of that. What these traditions and rituals and celebrations all have in common is that they are a time to honor the dead. Families come together to remember loved ones who have passed beyond our mortal coil and to help those restless spirits find peace in whatever new place they have gone, whatever new life they are now living. Many Asian cultures venerate their ancestors. They see their elders and the spirits of those who have come before as a resource for the family; for the living. They believe, as Joyce Carol Oates so eloquently put it that: “We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.” The Southern European cultures who celebrate Fiesta Dei Morti also seem to understand that children should not be shielded from death, but that they must embrace it as part of life. This is something I think we have lost sight of in this country. We spend so much time protecting our children from every danger and every possible experience they might fear that we are breeding them to fear everything because they never experience anything. Just look at Halloween. This wonderful ritual of guiding the spirits of our deceased family members to their ultimate reward has been replaced with a family-safe night of decorations, parties, and trick-or-treating. Our elders are relegated to nursing homes or managed care facilities and death is rarely discussed and never honored – not even on Memorial Day – a day that has become another in a long line of day’s off from work where families gather together for barbecues and sports. It's a wonderful time of togetherness and familial bonding, but I for one have never been to a cemetery on Memorial Day in my life. This isn't completely our fault, though. We have a lot of things working against our acknowledgement of the dead in this great society. I believe this anti-ancestor concept began, at least partly, after the Revolutionary war as a backlash against the British aristocracy. We are the nation of self-reliance, not the nation of good breeding. It didn't matter who your grandfather was, anyone could grow up to be president. In fact, two of our Presidents went on record with this exact sentiment. Abraham Lincoln had this to say: “I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.” While Franklin D. Roosevelt added this quip: “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrant and revolutionists.” We learned early on in this country that we didn’t need good breeding to succeed. We didn’t have to follow in our father’s footsteps. We could make it to the promised land without any help from our ancestors. Add to that national belief in self-reliance and the American dream that even a hundred years ago, the average lifespan was little more than 40 years, and several generations of families all lived under the same roof. Children had to face death because it happened more often, and it often happened in the home. Heck, the bodies were displayed in the parlor for the wake. Death is not as big a part of our lives now than it was a hundred years ago. And that is a good thing. I'm ecstatic that all four of my children's 70-plus-year-old grandparents are not only alive but in such excellent health that even I have no fears of losing them anytime soon. But there is a downside to keeping death at arm’s length. The only visions we and our children get of death today are from movies, video games, and, sometimes, the news. But even in the news, that death is distant, removed from our normal, day-to-day experience, and too often, I think, sanitized for our protection. This, I believe can have a chilling effect on our society. We recently marked 2,000 American deaths in Iraq, and who knows how many Iraqi deaths. And yet there is little uproar, little protest; at least not the vocal, world-changing uproar of even 30 years ago when our boys were dying in Vietnam. Some religious leaders want to remove scenes of carnage from movies and video games because they believe that seeing these images in such a detached medium will do irreparable harm to our children. I tend to agree that this is true. But I don’t think the answer is removing the images. I don’t think the path to a better world lies in further protecting ourselves and our children from fear and the unknown. If we are to honor our fallen, we must acknowledge their sacrifice. If we are to venerate our ancestors we must first respect their contribution to our lives. If we are to conquer our fear of death, we must first embrace it, at least for one night. We must help our children to understand that there is more to this world than our meager science can explain. They need to know that death is not the end of life, but simply another phase of that life. We should be teaching them that when a family member or beloved pet dies, it is only the body that is gone; that the spirit goes on, if only in our hearts. Halloween should be a time of remembering our past and those we have lost. Ghosts are real. They will haunt us if we let them. And when we allow ourselves to become completely removed from death, it is far easier for those ghosts to fester in our hearts. So, for one night, light a candle in a gourd and show those spirits the way home. Face those fears and those ghosts, and then release them back across the veil. Perhaps to Tir n’a nog. But keep their spirit in your hearts. I believe we will need the courage of our ancestors to face the coming darkness. |
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