Sermon for All Saints’ Day
What are these which are arrayed in white robes? And whence came they?
“Our revels now are ended”, it seems, as Shakespeare says in The Tempest. All the fuss and fun, fantasy and delight, horror and scare of Halloween is past. But is it? Or are only the ways in which contemporary culture co-opts the real meaning of Halloween finally over and finished, perhaps? What really is Halloween all about? Teaching children to become beggars and terrorists? Trick or Treat? All in the service of the candy world? Another commercial venture in pursuit of profit? There is no doubt that a number of events and activities have become associated with Halloween. But are they what it is really all about?
It is interesting to see how certain customs and practices arise and dominate our imaginations. In a way, Halloween has become hijacked to other secondary aspects and features of something else, something much more profound and significant which is easily lost from view. The point here is not to declaim against its ludic qualities – the sense of play and especially the play of the imagination signalled in masks and costumes, for instance. No. There is a deeper point captured in a wonderful Latin phrase. Abusus non tollit usum. The abuse or misuse of something does not take away from its proper use.
This is wisdom. We live in a world where all kinds of things are misused, a world where there is an abuse of language, of the world itself, of ourselves and of one another. The answer is not to be proscriptive but to recover a deeper sensibility and understanding of the better and proper use and purpose of things. And so, with Halloween. It is important to recall its truer meaning. Monday was properly speaking All Hallows’ Eve, the Eve of the Feast of All Saints in the western Christian traditions. While it connects with older themes about the borderlands between the living and the dead in many, many of the cultures of the world, it celebrates another view of our humanity than simply our mortality, another view of our humanity than the transformations of our own imaginations about ourselves. It offers us a profound vision of our humanity as a community of spirit which finds its truth in the worship and praise of God signalled in the lesson from The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine.
