Hallowed Evening: A Halloween Reflection
Curiosity can be a spiritual response to what we've been taught to fear.
This article/blog is intended as a gentle invitation to remember: many human cultures naturally fear what they don't understand.
Our book club was recently reminded of this as we encountered Part Two, Orientation – Experience, in Cindy S. Lee's Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation. Lee writes:
When Western missionaries entered foreign lands they encountered the many creative, vibrant, and diverse ways that human creatures interacted with the divine and supernatural. They experienced different smells and tastes, ways of using the body, and textures, sounds and colours. Instead of being inspired by the beauty of diversity, however, they responded with fear, domination and control. Theologian Cláudio Carvalhaes writes in his Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives that the agenda of colonialism was to eradicate differences and control differences within a Western uniformity. For the Western church, conversion was achieved not just through teaching a standard set of beliefs but through controlling bodies and sensory experiences and thus suppressing the communal spirit of a culture. (Lee, 2022, p. 57)
I have just completed my second journal assignment for my graduate course, Indigenous Christian Spirituality: Exploring the Common Threads That Bind Us Together. Through class discussions, textbook readings, and other experiences happening alongside my studies, I keep encountering a recurring story: the fear of white settlers when confronted with people, practices, and ways of knowing that differed from their own Eurocentric culture.
The relatedness and interconnectedness with all of creation that I understand to be central to many Indigenous teachings were (appear to have been) foreign to settlers. I find this curious, considering the Christian call to care for creation and "walk gently upon the earth." I don't remember relatedness and interdependence with the land being particularly significant in my own evangelical mennonite spiritual formation. And yet, now when I read Scripture, I see these themes throughout the text.
This growing awareness has been one of many small influences shaping my spirituality and my experience of the Divine. It has changed my relationship with God, myself, others, and the environment for the better. If I use Ignatian measures to consider whether these changes have brought me closer to or further from God, I am reassured that I'm not, in fact, "crazy"—as the dominant culture, Christian or otherwise, might have me believe. My experience has been an increase in love, faith, and hope because of this understanding, not a decrease.
The Indigenous Christian Spirituality course and its required readings, our church book club conversations, recent discussions with my own spiritual director, and various internal movements have all been coalescing. And today, on this Hallowed Evening (Halloween), I find myself thinking about how often what our culture tells us is scary, evil, or dangerous is simply what we don't understand.
Consider the women who lived outside the expectations of their communities: single women living independently, knowledgeable about herbal medicines, midwifery, plants, and the rhythms of the natural world; women comfortable in their bodies and uninterested in conforming to society's expectations of appearance, behaviour, or belief. Across different times and places, people like these have been labelled witches and persecuted, sometimes burned at the stake. Their knowledge, independence, and refusal to conform made them threatening to those who held power.
Consider foreign cultures and spiritual traditions, as Lee describes above, eradicated through outright violence or less overt forms of forced assimilation and re-culturation, including residential schools.
Consider darkness. It is so often labelled evil, and yet darkness is woven throughout the created order. There is the darkness of the womb from which we all come, the depths of the ocean, and the night that allows us to rest, sleep, and marvel at the beauty of the galaxy. Somehow, parts of evangelical Christianity have developed a way of understanding the world that equates darkness with evil. This is bad spiritual math.
And then there are bones, skeletons, ravens, fire, and cauldrons (aka. big pots for mixing and cooking)—all associated these days with the "evil" of Halloween.
This one is particularly curious to me. Have you read the prophet Ezekiel?! I've recently discovered that chapter 37 makes for a rather appropriate spooky-season reading. Ha!
In this story, Ezekiel is brought by God to - "a valley... It was full of bones."
How's that for setting a spooky scene?
(For full effect, get yourself a flashlight to shine up under your face while you read this passage aloud at night around an outdoor bonfire. You'll see what I mean!)
Ezekiel is led back and forth among what I assume are human bones. I think Christians often sanitize this story to the point that we forget just how unsettling the scene is. In my opinion, this does a great disservice to the text.
Try practicing Lectio Divina (Divine Reading) with this passage. Enter the story. Walk among the human bones in that valley, sometimes stumbling as the scene overwhelms your senses. Hear the voice of God,
"Can these bones live?"
(If you were here i would ask you, when you imagine hearing those words, is there a physical presence that accompanies them?)
As i imagine myself into this scene of Ezekiel 37, hearing God's voice draw attention to the bones lying on the ground, my response is : "God, I hope not!" (Nervous chuckle.)
I don't really want to see these bones become animated, to be honest. I've been brought up to associate animated bones and skeletons with evil, with Halloween, 'the Devil's holiday.'
Jesus, Lord, don't you know this?!
Instead, Ezekiel wisely responds, "Sovereign LORD, you alone know." (As I read this, I'm wondering, "What are you really thinking, Zeke?!" LOL)
Then the Divine Presence gives Zeke instructions. , “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.”
Me: Hot snot! Granted, that's some pretty impressive, epic power you've got there, God! But… bones that become animated, then acquire tendons, flesh, and skin… like zombies?!
Again, have you heard of Halloween? This is treading awfully close to what Christians in my day and age call evil, the 'work of the devil...'
Zeke, however, does what he's told. As he prophesies, a noise begins. Remember the scene: it's already creepy enough. Now there's noise! A rattling sound as the bones come together. Ezekiel watches as they become covered with tendons and flesh, and then skin. But they still have no breath.
God instructs Zeke to prophesy to the breath, calling it from the four winds to breathe into the slain so that they may live. And Zeke does.
When I read this story, enter into it, and really pay attention to what's happening, you know what it sounds like to me? It sounds remarkably similar to the incantations often put into the mouths of "evil" witches, sorcerers, and other practitioners of so-called magic in books and movies. There's something about the language and imagery here that makes me curious. Ezekiel is instructed to speak to the natural elements, calling upon the breath to come and bring life. Yet I was taught to demonize actions that look and sound remarkably similar.
I'm not suggesting that Ezekiel is practising witchcraft. I'm noticing how differently we can interpret similar images and actions depending on the stories we've inherited about what is holy and what is evil.
I'm also not trying to be difficult here. (Says every woman who is raising challenging questions.) I'm simply voicing some of the questions and connections that have crossed my mind as I've studied Scripture—as a Christian, a theology student, a former missionary, a parent, and a human being. To me, this discrepancy, placed alongside the recurring pattern of Eurocentric responses to things, people, ideas, and practices that make us uncertain or uncomfortable, is telling.
For me, personally, I have increasingly gathered the curiosity and courage to explore ways of knowing and being that were foreign to me until quite recently. You know what I've discovered? What used to scare me, what I once viewed as "evil," is often simply a different way of life that I didn't understand. What's more, as I explore ways of knowing that I was once told were dangerous or wrong, I often find that the Trinity is already there!
(Lol. I laugh in surprised delight!)
Just as the Divine Presence is with Zeke in that valley of bones—a scene scary AF!—the Divine Presence is with me as I encounter new, unfamiliar, uncomfortable, unsettling, and uncertain ideas and ways of knowing. I don't need to be afraid. God is with me in the valley of the shadow of death. I need not fear evil, for God is with me.
Halloween, Hallowed Evening, is an incredibly community-building holiday, in my experience.
What other day of the year do your neighbours come to your door in droves? I see my neighbours most regularly on Halloween, and then again in the summer, when we're out and about enjoying the weather on our neighbourhood walks.
On Halloween, ours is the house that sets up a bonfire in the front yard. String lights twinkle from the big maple tree, now bare (and spooky?) of its leaves. We brew hot drinks for chilly fingers and make space for trick-or-treaters and their accompanying adults to stay awhile: to enjoy the warmth of the fire, have a chat, and connect with other costumed humans.
I've grown to love Halloween evening deeply for the connections and warmth it offers amid the darkness of the season we're in. I mean both the autumnal absence of daylight and the darkness of the broader social landscape: the authoritarianism, destruction, and lack of community-building priorities that seem so pervasive in our North American societies.
What is your experience of Halloween? Were you brought up to distance yourself from it's 'inherant evil'?
It's my sense that this day is worth reframing and re-exploring, despite the fear or distaste it might evoke for some. Have the courage to ask questions of the Divine Presence who brings skeletons to life, clothes them with flesh, and invites Ezekiel to speak words that sound, to our modern ears, remarkably like magical incantations.
It's worth remembering that one of Scripture's most frequent messages is: "Do not be afraid."
Could it be that Creator knows how much of our unloving behaviour comes from fear?
This Hallowed Evening, I invite you to wonder with me:
How can I practice not being afraid when I'm standing in the midst of a valley of bones, a valley of shadow and death?
Where might I sense God's presence in that valley?
What do I notice when I allow myself to stay curious rather than retreat into fear?
Perhaps the invitation isn't to make the unfamiliar familiar right away, or to explain away what unsettles us, or why. Perhaps it's simply to stay present, to listen, and to trust that the Divine Presence is already there.
Halloween deserves a fresh look. Curiosity can be a spiritual response to what we have been taught to fear.
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