Happy Halloween/Oiche Shamhna

I love Halloween. I always have. I love dressing up, telling ghost stories and watching horror movies, visiting haunted houses. Further, I think that there is something very psychologically and spiritually healthy about taking a long, hard look at evil and death, and even having a laugh at their expense. As C.S. Lewis said, "The devil cannot stand to be mocked." Here is a levity that comes from the Christian consciousness that evil and death no longer have any power over us.

Still, I recognize that Halloween is the object of no small amount of criticism in Christian circles, particularly in more fundamentalist circles. These generally well-intentioned Christians frequently (and often accurately) cite the pagan origins of Halloween, especially in the Irish harvest festival of Samhain (pronounced SOW-in). They say that such pre-Christian observances have no place in Christian life, that they are at best syncratistic, at worst idolatrous.

But what, historically, has been the Church's attitude toward pre-Christian cultures? What has been her missionary philosophy? Our modern term inculturation describes this ancient phenomenon aptly. Inculturation is the principle by which Christian missionaries affirm all that is good and true and beautiful in a culture, and reconcile it to the Christian faith. One recalls especially the great Jesuit missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, priests like Matteo Ricci, who so insinuated himself into Chinese culture as to become Chinese himself. He donned the garb of a Mandarin scholar, and so impressed the Imperial Court with his knowledge of astronomy and mathematics that he was able to convert a good number of them to Christ.

At the basis of the inculturation principle is the assumption that one can be fully Irish or Chinese or whatever AND fully Christian. After all, if Christ could be fully divine and fully human, so also could Ricci's converts be fully Christian and fully Chinese.

Which brings us back to Halloween/Samhain. The missionaries that first preached the Gospel to the Irish knew intuitively that they could not simply level Irish culture and build Christian culture atop it. Beyond being impractical, it is simply impossible, since Christian culture as such does not exist. Rather, they affirmed and reconciled Irish culture to Christian faith. The festival of Samhain was not only a harvest festival, but also a festival of the dead, a time when the spirit world was considered particularly close to our own. Christian missionaries recognized in this belief a shadow of the Christian belief in the communion of the saints, the connectedness of all who have died in Christ. Largely due to the experience of the Irish missionaries, Pope Gregory III (d. 741) fixed the date for the Feast of All Saints (or "All Hallows") on November 1.

Centuries later, Halloween/Samhain remains a festival in which we recall the reality and the imminence of the spirit world, in which we laugh at the devil and laugh with the saints, when we honor the God who reconciles all peoples and cultures to Himself, who has destroyed death and darkness forever.