This post may seem a little strange to my United States readers where Halloween is a normal fixture appearing in the calendar each year and celebrated with fanfare, delight and not much of a second thought, but here in New Zealand it’s a recent introduction and it’s growing in popularity quickly. Many of us didn’t grow up with Halloween, so it was just this strange thing we watched other countries do at a distance. In Evangelical circles it was always derided as misguided at best and straight up evil at worst. I grew up hearing stories about kids being given apples with razor blades in them, lollies coated in deadly substances and stories about child abductions hitting a high at Halloween with child sacrifices and satanic rituals being undertaken with gusto across the night of October 31. This is my feeble attempt to process all of that and what Halloween might mean in my context.

Needless to say I’ve got past the alarmism around Halloween that I grew up believing. Now I’m just dismayed that through television and the push of large consumer retailers who saw a golden opportunity to sell, sell and sell some more, we’ve bought into Halloween – something that has never been a part of our national identity. I’ve been happy to sit with that dismay and simply ignore Halloween, but last night it dawned on me that while it’s an introduced ‘celebration’ for people of my generation and older, for my 7 year old daughter it’s something that has always been there and probably always will be – it’s not going away. Because of that I have a responsibility to process it, but I want to develop some thoughts that aren’t simply reactionary.

For the record, I support the idea of light parties and other alternatives to trick or treating for kids, but I also think there is room for Evangelical Christians to not simply react to and shun the more traditional forms of Halloween. Of course, it would also be easy to simply default to placing my focus on All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day (November 1 and 2) and try to simply ignore the pop culture of the night of October 31, but that doesn’t quite get there for me either even though All Saints’ Day features in my yearly rhythm. I want the borders between my faith and the culture around me to be porous and so while I think there is room to challenge the consumerism of Halloween, I think there is also room to discuss my faith in the context of the popular rituals of it.

Studies of where the rituals of Halloween come from focus on its Christian heritage (usually relating to thoughts around Purgatory) and also Samhain. It’s the pre-Christian roots of Samhain that interest me and when we look at Halloween, I think it’s more related to this than the Christian influence.

Samhain was/is a Gaelic festival; one of the four main seasonal festivals along with Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh. Samhain marked the end of the harvest season and entry into the darker half of the year (winter) and so in the Southern Hemisphere it is often celebrated by Celtic neo-pagans at the other end of the year. Where it gets interesting is that Samhain and Beltane were/are seen as liminal times.

Liminality is about transition – it’s a time that lacks certainty and is full of ambiguity and disorientation and so during Samhain and Beltane this liminal time represented a thinning of the space between the material world and the ‘spiritual’ realm, thus allowing the Aos Si (a supernatural race – spirits – fairies and elves) to enter this world along with the souls of dead family and friends. It is believed by some that the tradition of costumes during Samhain started as a way for people to disguise themselves from the Aos Si as they went from door-to-door obtaining food during the night of October 31.

I want to focus on the idea of Halloween being a liminal time. Liminality is something we often flee from. The idea of liminality captures a time of change – a space of uncertainty, sometimes brought on by crisis. It can be that time between jobs, identity shifts, financial crisis; any time that places us at a threshold or precipice where we are no longer in the old, but nor are we in the new. It’s a bit of a desert space where much of who we think we are gets stripped away. It’s a time when the arrogant veneer of certainty crumbles and we well and truly stand outside of our comfort zone. It’s often a time of fear, humility, shakiness and unknowing. It’s a time where the rug can feel like it has been pulled out from underneath us and we’re made to face our ‘demons’ and our mortality. It’s a thin space and if we look through the story of the Bible it’s in this place where God often shaped people – both individuals and communities. There are stories in scripture of people and communities being plunged into liminal times, having much of who they thought they were or had become, stripped away, only to be reshaped by God. In that liminal space they often faced the worst of who they were and the fears and uncertainty of such a space. In that space they also discovered God in whole new ways and were reformed by His shaping.

Halloween, through that lens, takes on a deeper meaning. Halloween is a chance to remember our need to embrace our own liminal times – to step away from the certainty, let the space become truly thin and allow God to act. The costumed freak show then becomes metaphorical of our own fears, our own ‘demons’, our lack of certainty and our mortality in that liminality. Our engagement with others through things like trick-or-treating and various other celebrations is a reminder that we don’t face change on our own – we’re always in relationship with others. Halloween becomes a chance to embrace the unknown – to step out onto that threshold and be ok with all the strange senses that come from standing on the precipice. Halloween offers a chance to throw aside the arrogance of our certainty and embrace the bigness of the unknown – it’s a chance to step into the desert and once again, commit to allowing God to truly shape us even though that space can be scary.

Now, I fully understand that pop culture isn’t going to embrace this understanding of Halloween and I have no need to try and spark a great conversion to it – but it gives me a way to not simply be reactionary towards this newly adopted celebration in New Zealand and it gives me a way to talk to my daughter about it… it’s the result of my own embrace of the liminal space that has come with us going from a non-Halloween country to being another nation in the list of those who take part in it.

Update: I have a ‘Part 2’ to this post here.

Note: The Day of the Dead celebrated in Mexico and many other countries is very similar and weaves into the fabric of pop culture Halloween – there are lessons in it relating to the cycle of life and death and the stories of our own ancestors. My focus is Samhain because the Gaelic and Celtic heritage is where my family is from.