This is another hot one that sends
people into moral seizures if you don't tread carefully, or even if you do, the
best you can sometimes hope for is a hostile "agree to disagree".
Halloween is coming and I love it.
Less specifically, I love Fall. I love Pumpkin Spice Lattes. I love decorating.
I love dressing up, I love giving candy to children, as creepy as that sounds.
I love Fall and Halloween is inextricably part of Fall's flavor in our culture
today. The big question every year is how should Christians react to this
holiday. It usually involves a lot of convoluted, technically and morally
ambiguous definitions, testimonies, often fictitious, from "ex-coven"
members, pious but useless truisms and historical inaccuracies. In high school
we watched a movie about how evil Halloween was, and if possible, were given a
huge test or project due the day after to prevent us from going out to in any
way celebrate.
My thoughts? I'm so glad you asked!
First off. Halloween isn't about
Satan. It's about money. Economy-wise, this is another market convention, like
Black Friday.
Second. If we're going to have this
discussion, we need to educate ourselves, which is difficult considering how
much bullshit is out there.
Point A. Paganism, Satanism, and
Secularism are all three different belief systems that DO NOT MIX, even if
people decide to get all pluralistic. By definition, you cannot have all three,
like moral absolutes and moral relativism (and if you're going to say, well,
it's all from Satan's deceptions, so isn't it the same thing, I would say,
technically that's all sin, making you, yourself, a Satanist, so let's be
careful about how we use our terms).
Point B. Trying to figure out who
came up with Halloween first is moot point. There is NO END to this argument.
We can only speculate. Discuss with as much abandon as you can muster, my
history-nerdy-lovelies, but we could just as soon pin down the historical King
Arthur.
Briefly, Paganism wasn't like a
style of coat in one store on the British isles when Christian monk burglars
broke in, stole the lot, made some creative adjustments and put them on display
at their own store across the street. England, Scotland, Ireland, were broken
into many small kingdoms that were all visited by Christian missionaries at
different times and with different agendas and different methods, and they
arrived AFTER the Northerners (Saxons, Angles, Jutes, to name the larger
groups) had come in and taken over the Bretons--Celts--matching and mixing
their own unique, "Pagan" cultures. And while the Christian
missionaries actually tried to preserve the cultures they were visiting, the
Northmen tended to do what made them famous as vikings: burn shit down.
Complicate it further, literacy came with the Christian missionaries, beginning
recorded history, so it's quite easy for Pagan enthusiasts to say they botched
up history in their own nefariously Judeo-Christian favor--which is often
true--but the problem is SO MUCH MORE complex than that and, even better,
impossible to prove. We can't simply say, "Well, it was our holiday until
you erased our name and wrote yours at the top."
So, for painful argument's sake,
impossibly simplified, we have three holidays to choose from, three if you
count it as a Satanic holiday, which was probably celebrated just for shock
appeal, because really, Christians give it up too easy. Aside from these three
holidays, we have a night of the year when kids get to dress up and have fun
taking candy from total strangers.
There is no direct link between
kids dressing up and trick-or-treating and Pagan rites. Kinda like not every
person who gives a gift at Christmas is giving in honor of Jesus. Any other day
of the year, kids would still love to dress up and scare the crap out of each
other. Those who follow Wicca, or Pagan beliefs actually aren’t (in my
experience at least) all that fond of the witch in a pointy hat with warts and
green skin. Letting your child dress up like that is actually less than
sympathetic.
Some things are by their nature a
problem. Cheating on your spouse, for example. Having dinner with someone of
the opposite sex? Some people would say that is never appropriate once you’re
married and that it’s sending misleading signals if you’re not interested in
the person. IMHO, that one's all on you, your strengths, weaknesses, interests.
I have lots of guy friends I would totally have dinner with because I know
that, for me, dinner would not be a possibly compromising situation.
Dinner
with Benedict Cumberbatch, now that would get me in trouble. I’d probably have
to invite my husband and my senior pastor before feeling morally at ease with
that one.
Same with watching your nutrition.
Once a week, I allow myself a day to eat whatever I want without counting
calories. This helps me keep my cravings down so I don’t binge (which would be
the definite bad), and so my body doesn’t go into starvation-mode and think I’m
dieting and therefore hold on to food. I can look at that cookie (21 days out
of the month at least) and say, “I’ll see you
this weekend.” A close friend of mine can’t do this. She has to gain momentum
in an opposite direction and maintain that momentum or it’s all over. If she
gives in to the cookie, she’ll cave entirely.
I can’t speak for everyone, but for
me, so far at least, my experiences have not led me to a place where “celebrating”
Halloween has ever encouraged me to worship any being besides the
Judeo-Christian God. And if your experiences have led you in that direction,
this blog is not aimed at you, there is no judging, because that is a different
matter altogether. For people with certain backgrounds and experiences, the
wise choice might be to treat it like any other day of the year, but that is
between you and God, not you and an uneducated, morally insensitive mob.
My husband and I have five swords
hanging in our hallway (and some still being stored until we figure out where
to put them because we’re running out of wall space). This frightens people,
but not because of what you might think. The sense of danger doesn't come from
the swords as much as from the level of nerdiness this registers about the
owners.
I have Arwen's Hadafang (which, yes, does not exist in the book) and
John has Aragorn's Anduril and we just revel in the Medieval-Tolkien-Jackson
goodness. It’s fun to take people into the hallway and see them be either
totally geeked out and speechless or weirded out and speechless. As a medieval
history pedant, this is a source of pride for me. I love the idealism, bring on
lords and ladies, magic horns and Camelot and Excaliber and Beowulf and Sigurd!
Flash back to 7th century Britain.
Those same swords are decorating
the mead-hall and I probably hate them. I hate seeing them because I know my
brother will take one into battle and possibly be killed. I hate seeing another
because it was the sword that killed my father (yay for blood-feud and
peace-brides). At any moment, a neighboring kingdom may decide to invade for
vengeance, Vikings (those that were early by a few hundred years) might land on
shore with a war horn and while present century me loves the sound, 7th
century me knows it may mean my entire family will be killed and if I’m lucky,
I’ll be killed before anything worse can happen to me.
Present century me and 7th
century me will never be able to look at those swords the same. It's like
suddenly running a current through a dead electric fence. If I choose to grab a
sword off the wall, my intent is what takes it from being an artifact to a
weapon. I've electrified the fence.
I wanted to put a picture here, but I couldn't find one with enough realism that didn't make the point only too well.
Now, to be fair, there is a limit
to this. Some symbols don't lose their punch. I don't think any girl, no matter
how incredibly stupidly “SoCal”, is ever going to sport a purse decorated with sparkly swastikas.
No matter how Bejeweled, Nazism is never again going to be trendy. Hopefully.
I'm a little jumpy around Focus on
the Family but I would like to close with them.
“Even here, however, there is a
place for some harmless fun. Kids love to dress up and pretend. If the
Halloween experience is focused on fantasy rather than the occult, I see no
harm in it. Make costumes for your children that represent fun characters…”
What is it for you? What is Halloween an opportunity to do, for you? I love seeing innocent little children dressing up as their favorite heroes and Disney princesses, spending time with their parents and getting to use their imaginations before the adult world smacks it out of them. I even like getting to discuss history in amicable settings, tracing the traditions back, learning about the sense of festival when people would have a good crop harvested and then celebrate because they weren't going to starve that winter. I hope you all have a beautiful Fall and glorify God with rejoicing in the beauty and complexity He built into our world and into our relationships. May you always balance well in your eschatological tension.
