Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Happy Halloween!

You probably already know this, but the word “Halloween” is really a contraction of the words “All Hallows’ Eve,” with tomorrow, 1 November, being the Feast of All Hallows / Hallowmas / All Saints’ Day (which we celebrate with a Mass at 7pm). Halloween is the Vigil of All Saints, in the same way that Christmas Eve is the Vigil of Christmas and the Easter Vigil is…well…the Vigil of Easter.

What’s unique about Halloween among all these other Vigils is that it’s the only one of them that’s managed to eclipse in the popular imagination the Feast it anticipates. Notwithstanding the growing interest among churchgoers in the glory and beauty of the Easter Vigil, few outside the Church know of it; and while Mardi Gras can be seen as another special instance of a day-before overtaking the day-itself, it’s hardly a Vigil, and Ash Wednesday is hardly a Feast!

So folks tend to love Halloween. Or rather, they tend to like what Halloween has become in the popular culture: a way of familiarizing ourselves with death, of getting ourselves over the fear of death through exposure to our worst fears about it. But it also goes a little deeper than just fear of death—the boundary between life and death, the living and the dead, is especially invested with power and meaning, particularly as a boundary that isn’t meant to be remarkably porous. The dead ought to stay dead and the living ought to be able to live out the balance of their lives without much (if any) interference from “The Other Side.” On Halloween, though, we’ve a ready-made cultural excuse to frighten ourselves into asking, “But what if….” What if the boundary isn’t quite as solid as anyone thinks? What would happen if someone or something slipped from one side to the other? These questions form the basis of so many stories of both the terrifically wonderful and the terrifyingly horrific…and they tend to form the basis of news headlines as well, which often skew more toward horror than wonder. Our way of thinking about that boundary between life and death has a way of showing up in our way of thinking about most other boundaries in our lives. And very often, the mere fact or presence of a boundary suggests that what’s on the other side of it is not an Other who can be received and to which one can be given, but a contrary that must be opposed, or an object to be appropriated or assimilated

So perhaps for the sake of our relationships, the sake of communities, for the sake, in fact, of right understanding of the Communion of Saints that we’ll celebrate tomorrow, it’s important to set aside a time to consider and even question the assumptions we have regarding the boundaries in our lives. And particularly as Christians, we might want to hesitate before we take some of these assumptions for granted.

For instance, the sacred/profane boundary that informs a lot of our sense of the natural and supernatural could use some edifying interrogation. What if, for instance, the sacred weren’t actually opposed to the profane? What if the sacred could be seen as revelatory of the meaning and purpose of the profane? What if the holy wasn’t a thing set apart from the world, but the thing in which the world is rooted, the thing that leads us to encounter the world as deeply sacramental, as itself revelatory of God such that what is sacred is the fulfillment, not the contrary, of what is profane? What if between the sacred and profane there were not a chasm of radical discontinuity, but a two-fold process of revelation—by which the natural points to the holy and reveals the holy as the meaning of nature—and transformation—by which the natural is understood to be assumed by the holy, shot through with holiness, illuminated by the sacred?

And what if the same could even be said of life and death? What if death were not something to which we are meant to become accustomed or familiarized, but something we can understand as being given meaning by life, indeed, by the One who is Life itself, who encountered death and made of it an entry into endless life?

What if in Jesus Christ we were to understand that, as people of faith, we’re not being asked to slip back and forth between opposite worlds sacred and profane, living and dead, but called to receive the world as mystic sweet communion, as something whole, revealed and revelatory, renewed, restored by love for love’s sake? What if (taking an image from our Office Gospel today) we were to understand our finite lives as capable of bearing the fruit of eternity not in spite of ourselves, but because that’s what we’re for? What if today we could receive the grace to live the sacramental reality of our lives?

Dear beloved Friend, I hope you have a terrifically wonderful Halloween today in anticipation of the Feast of the Saints tomorrow!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+