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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.

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