I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I was a devil for Halloween when I was little. I was three or four years old, I think, and there’s photographic evidence of me walking down the street in my little red costume, plastic pitchfork in hand, swinging my tail. My parents no doubt thought it was appropriate. One of my brothers was a bat that year and the other was a clown. It was the sixties.
Things have changed a bit. There’s far less DIY costumes, for starters. That’s a shame because you can’t beat a good made-by-my-mom-or-dad costume. I was an astronaut the year they landed on the moon and, one time - just one time, I was Robin to my older brother’s Batman. Now there’s lots of store bought ones, which is fine, although they’re of varying degrees of quality. Most popular this year (according to Google) includes Shrunken Head Bob from the Beetlejuice movies, Beetlejuice himself, Taylor Swift, Barbie and Ken, Tinkerbell, clowns, witches, skeletons and, of course, favourite action figures. There’s no politicians on anyone’s list, so that’s one less scary thing to watch out for.
The point is, whoever or whatever we dress up as, it’s not who we really are.
That’s in the old pagan origins of Halloween. It’s tied to the ancient celtic festival of Samhain - and various other ancient pagan festivals, too - when people believed that the boundary between this and the “otherworld” was thin. Spirits, harmless and harmful, were able to pass through, and families honoured their ancestors and warded off past enemies and evil spirits. That’s the origin of wearing masks and costumes, to hide one’s identity from the harmful spirits.
But the name Hallowe’en comes from All Hallow’s Eve, the night before All Hallows Day or, as we know it now, All Saints Day. That’s the day the church celebrates “saints,” those people that have been historically held up as examples of living well as a follower of Jesus, of living as Jesus taught us to live.
It would be great to see some saints out at Halloween. Maybe that would remind us to look for them the other 364 days of the year.
In the spirit and fun of All Hallow’s Eve, don’t lose sight of the day after. Honouring our ancestors, honouring historical saints, honouring biblical characters is important and we can learn from them. But don’t let your sight rest solely on the past. Look around you. I bet you know a few saints, real, living, breathing saints. Of course you do. Saints don’t have to be long dead, dusty statues in an old church. The ones that will have the most meaning in our lives are the ones that are in our lives.
It might be someone who has a specific role that helps people or just someone who volunteers, someone who cares, someone who’s there when you need them. It could be someone whose courage inspires you, or their creativity or their commitment. Or it could just be someone making their way through the day.
Keep your eyes open. They’re everywhere. Sometimes they might even be disguised or be hiding in plain sight or in an unlikely place. Sometimes they might even look a little devilish, but look closely. Look for what’s true.
