Skip to main content

All Hallows' Eve: when the ghostly eerie exposes the empty secular

As a teller and writer of ghostly tales, I celebrate Halloween with enthusiasm. Every October 31, as many as 400 trick-or-treaters have found their way to our tall Italianate house in a decayed village in Michigan these past two decades, and we have both tricked and treated them, to their dreadful joy - Russell Kirk.

Even apart from the traditions of All Hallows' Eve, during the season of long, dark nights, as A Clerk of Oxford reminds us, it is "natural enough to associate winter darkness with the eerie and unearthly".  It is "a time strongly associated with ghost stories". 

All Hallows' Eve provides a focus for the eerie, the spooky, the unearthly.  As Andrew Brown states in an excellent article in today's Guardian, the rejection by some evangelicals of this aspect of the customs and traditions of All Hallows' Eve undermines a wider cultural recognition of the supernatural:

because if the supernatural does not have an edge of terror, then it is not worth bothering with, and unless Halloween is a festival of darkness it’s nothing more than a marketing opportunity for sweet-sellers.

The 'light party' as an alternative to this is, as Brown says, "simultaneously banal and offputtingly weird", failing to have cultural resonance while also failing to communicate an understanding of the reality of darkness.

The spooky, eerie traditions of All Hallows' Eve - mocking the 'buffered self' of a secular age - reflect something of C.S. Lewis' provocative urging, "First let us make the younger generation good pagans and afterwards let us make them Christians".  Thus Lewis' view that "Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian" is perhaps suggested by this night.

There is a sense in which the festivity and customs of All Hallows' Eve does mock what John Hughes described as "the Anglo-Saxon temperament" of much contemporary Atheism:

it often has a rather limited bourgeois aesthetic sensibility; it is suspicious of images and metaphors, in a way that can incline towards philistinism in its love of brute facts.

Against the philosophical brutalism of contemporary Atheism, the Church should be joyfully sharing in the celebration of the eerie practices of All Hallows' Eve, for these are closer to the Real than that deadening, banal philosophy. 

Of course, there are aspects of how the contemporary Hallowe'en is marked that the Church will need to challenge - the celebration of gore, rampant commercialisation, the mockery of those with disabilities.  But these are unfortunate, more recent developments, reflecting little of older customs and traditions. 

So, on this night of ghoulies and ghosties, of eerie stories and shadows cast by lit pumpkins, let us share in the festivities, knowing that All Hallows' Eve suggestively celebrates the emptiness of the secular myth and atheist banality, foreshadowing a hope fulfilled in All Saints' Day, when we behold darkness radiant with bright Light, death transfigured by the fullness of Life.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I support the ordination of women: a High Church reflection

A number of commenters on this blog have asked about my occasional expressions of support for the ordination of women to all three orders.  With some hesitation, I have decided to post a summary of my own views on this matter.  The hesitation is because I have sought on this blog to focus on issues and themes which can unify those who identify with or have respect (grudging or otherwise!) for what we might term 'classical' Anglicanism (the Anglicanism of the Formularies and - yes - of the Old High Church tradition).  Some oppose the ordination of women (and I have friends and colleagues who do so, Anglo-Catholic, High Church, and Reformed Evangelical).  Some of us support it (again, friends and colleagues covering a wide range of theological traditions). Below, I have organised my thinking around 5 points (needless to say, no reference to Dort is implied). 1. The Declaration for Subscription required of clergy in the Church of Ireland states: (6) I promise to submit ...
25 comments
Read more

How the Old High tradition continued

Charles Gore's 1914 letter to the clergy of his diocese, ' The Basis of Anglican Fellowship ', can be regarded as a classical expression of the Prayer Book Catholic tradition.  A key part of the letter - entitled 'Romanizing in the Church of England' - addressed the "Catholic movement", questioning beliefs and practices within it which tended to "a position which makes it very difficult for its extremer representatives to give an intelligible reason why they are not Roman Catholics".  Gore provides the outlines of an alternative account and experience of catholicity within Anglicanism, defined by three characteristics.  What is particularly interesting about these characteristics is their continuity with the older High Church tradition.  Indeed, the central characteristic as set out by Gore was integral to High Church claims over centuries: To accept the Anglican position as valid, in any sense, is to appeal behind the Pope and the authority of t...
19 comments
Read more

1928 practices and the 1979 book: unthinking conservatism or popular piety?

Those responsible for Earth & Altar - a new blog emanating from a group within TEC - are to be congratulated for an excellent contribution to wider Anglican discussion and debate. The commitment to "an expansively conceived credal orthodoxy as fully compatible with LGBTQ inclusion, gender equality, and racial justice" is an important part of a wider retrieval of creedal orthodoxy within what we might call the post-liberal generation. It is in this spirit that I want to respond to a recent post on the site by Andrew McGowan , Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and Professor of Anglican Studies at Yale Divinity School.  Against the background of another round of "ill-defined" liturgical revision in TEC, he understandably urges that a fuller reception of the 1979 BCP should occur before further reforms. In doing so, however, he takes aim at what he describes as "clinging to the ritual structures of 1928" while using the text of 1979.  We ...
2 comments
Read more