Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 60

Post-Halloween Thoughts

Every year, as October 31 approaches and my church friends begin their usual round of posting links to blogs and websites explaining why Halloween is the devil’s holiday and their family chooses not to celebrate it, I always think I should post something on the blog about why we do take part in this annual ritual. But the last minute preparations around getting costumes ready and in some cases baking treats (as we did this year for two different parties my two different teenagers attended) keeps me so busy I never get time to write the blog post. One teen has already outgrown the trick or treating phase (Chris announced this year that one of his friends still wanted to go door-to-door, but the others outvoted him on the grounds that these hulking fifteen-year-olds “got too many judgmental looks last year!”, presumably from people who don’t want to feel like six-footers are shaking them down for candy that rightfully belongs to little kids). Emma will soon move out of that age bracket too, so this might be my last year of running to Value Village frantically looking for that last-minute item to complete a costume (unless, of course, it’s MY costume). It might also be my last year of being judged and condemned at church for allowing my kids to dress up on Halloween. Which would be nice, but unfortunately people who want to judge will always find something else that I’m doing wrong.

So many Christians have such strong feelings about Halloween, though, that I figured I should put my thoughts out there before it ceases to be an issue in our family.

First of all, I want to say that I absolutely support anyone’s right not to observe Halloween (or any other holiday for that matter). If you have decided for any reason whatsoever that it’s not right for your family, that is absolutely your prerogative and I will defend to the death your right to keep your kids home, not give out candy, plan an alternate celebration or whatever works for you. I’m all about individuals and families choosing what’s right for them. I’d love to see some of the same tolerance going in the other direction but I’ve learned that’s a bit much to hope for.

Celebrating — or not celebrating — Halloween, has become a much bigger issue in our own and other conservative Christian churches in the last generation. I laughed pretty hard a couple of years ago when one of my Adventist friends posted about how blessed she was that her children weren’t participating in this evil holiday, then went on to say what a wonderful time her daughter had had earlier that day at her ballet class. It made me laugh because when I was an Adventist kid growing up in the 1970s, Halloween was a non-issue — we had no idea there was anything wrong with it — but dancing? Not a chance. Even ballet was the devil’s art form because it was, after all, dance, and no Adventist girl I knew ever got ballet lessons.

It just goes to show that sin, like everything else, is subject to fashions and trends.

That said, Halloween itself has changed over the years, and maybe some of the church’s changing attitudes reflect that societal change. When I was a kid I remember Halloween being about cute and sometimes mildly “scary” costumes, collecting a modest-sized plastic pumpkin full of treats, and also collecting pennies for Unicef when we went door-to-door. That was about it. It’s only in recent years that it’s become a huge marketing extravaganza — apparently the third-biggest marketing season in North America, after Christmas and Back-to-School. Decorating for Halloween used to mean that houses with small children put a few construction-paper pumpkins in the window; now some houses put out Halloween decorations that rival their Christmas displays (which will, of course, go up the day the Halloween decorations come down — but don’t get me started on that tangent!) Our smallish city now supports three stores dedicated to Halloween costumes alone (almost four, really, since Value Village transforms into Halloween central during September and October). As a person who’s constantly alarmed by the growing tide of consumerism, I am, of course, bothered by this.

Halloween has not only gotten to be bigger business; it’s also more gruesome than when I was a kid. There’s far more emphasis on death, horror movies, zombie makeup and everything dark and scary, then I ever remember there being. I realize there are people who believe there’s a big psychological benefit to embracing and laughing at the darker sides of life, but that’s definitely not for me. I’m easily scared: I once shrieked in terror and ran out of the room because a bowl of blueberries fell out of my fridge and rolled across the floor (they looked like bugs when they hit the floor) and I have never watched even one second of a horror movie. If someone wants to eschew Halloween just because they want to stay away from “the dark side,” I totally respect that decision, although I firmly believe it’s possible to have a good Halloween without any gore or death-imagery at all. The rule for our kids has always been “No gory/scary/evil/death-obsessed costumes,” and that’s never been a problem for them (in fact, my own costume this year was probably the goriest one ever in our house — it’s the only time I’ve ever bought fake blood — but it was for the sake of historical/literary accuracy. More on that later!).

I guess for me, my biggest quarrel with the anti-Halloween movement has been that all the talk about its “evil origins” and it being “the devil’s holiday” simply makes no sense. There are lots of theories about the roots of our modern Halloween, but the two things it can most easily be traced to (though neither in a direct line of transmission) are the pagan observance of  Samhain and the Catholic observance of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day.  When I say there’s no direct line of transmission, I mean that modern Halloween is basically of modern origins, but it occurs at the same time of year as those two very old seasonal rituals, and borrows some imagery from them.

I’m not sure why people get so upset, to be honest, about the fact that holidays have “pagan origins.” Everything we do has pagan origins because all our ancestors were pagans. Ancient people lived much closer to the land than we do, and in agrarian societies, at least in parts of the world where we have four distinct seasons, rituals and celebrations tended to grow up around the turning of the seasons. In autumn, people want to celebrate the good harvest and huddle together against the growing darkness. At midwinter people wait and watch and pray for the return of the light. In spring people want to celebrate birth and life and fertility and growth. Naturally these seasonal rituals, rooted in God’s good created world all around us, got tied in to the feast and fasts of both pagan and early Christian religions. To deny that is to attempt to further distance ourselves from the earth, to imagine ourselves as purely spiritual beings floating somewhere above our planet, not really concerned with its times or seasons — and that’s a kind of Christianity which I wholeheartedly reject.

What I don’t get is — how does acknowledging a celebration’s pagan origins make it dangerous for those of us who no longer practice that pagan religion? I have been dressing up for nearly every Halloween, one way or another, for the better part of 48 years, and never once has putting on a costume or eating a mini chocolate bar made me want to worship an earth goddess or perform a human sacrifice. Rituals are what we make them, and the meaning they carry is the meaning we give them. My Wiccan friend has rituals and meaning associated with her modern, neo-pagan observance of Samhain which are not the same rituals as ancient Celtic pagans observed (though they may in some cases be inspired by them). Many Christians today celebrate All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day as religious services. And many modern, secular people observe Halloween without it being in any way tied to the religons their ancestors practiced. It’s essentially a secular celebration that occurs at the same time as some ancient religious celebrations, both pagan and Christian. What it means is what we make it mean.

So, dressing up and giving out candy on Halloween doesn’t make me a Samhain-celebrating pagan anymore than referring to the days of the week as Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, etc., makes me a worshipper of the Norse gods. There’s nothing wrong with knowing the origins of the things you do, but the origins of an event do not define its meaning. We define the meanings of events and rituals by how we practice them.

As for Halloween being “the devil’s holiday,” that just makes no sense. Ancient pagans didn’t “worship the devil” ; they didn’t even believe in “our” devil (nor do modern Wiccans or other neo-pagans). “The devil,” or Satan, is a figure of ultimate evil in the Christian religion and the Christian Bible; other religions don’t believe in him. Christians don’t dedicate holidays to him. So it’s pretty safe to say that there was nobody, hundreds of years ago, “worshipping the devil” at the end of October.

What I think causes confusion in some people’s minds and makes some Christians uncomfortable is that modern Halloween shares with both Samhain and All Saints’/All Souls’ Days a focus on the dead. This can be a positive focus — remembering and reflecting on those who’ve gone before, feeling close to them at this time of year — but it can also be a negative focus, an obsession with the idea of death (and un-death, as evidenced by the current zombie craze). For a lot of Christians, death is associated with evil and the devil, so the fact that those things are focused on much more at Halloween causes them to identify it as “the devil’s holiday.” Again, if that focus on death and “the dark side” makes people uncomfortable and feel they can’t participate in the celebration in good conscience, I totally respect that. But there’s nothing in either the pagan or the Christian origins of the late October holiday that specifically associates it with the spiritual power that Christians call “Satan” or “the devil.”

Personally, I’m not just a Christian but a Seventh-day Adventist Christian, which means that I believe the dead, both the good and the bad among them, are sleeping soundly in their graves, unable either to haunt or to comfort us with their presence. I appreciate that ancient people believed the “veil” between this world and the afterlife was thinner and more permeable at this turning point of the year but I don’t personally believe that, or even believe that there is any such veil. And while I appreciate the impulse behind Christians who observe All Saints’ Day, I think about my beloved dead, especially my mom and my friend Jamie, every single day and don’t feel closer to or more “in touch” with them at any particular time of the year. Really, the dead have no place in my family’s celebration of the modern, secular rite of Halloween.

So, why do we celebrate Halloween at our house? In a word? Costumes. I love dressing up. I love the creativity of coming up with a costume, and you could not possibly make me happier than to invite me to a costume party, whether at the end of October or at any other time. Although it’s sometimes been a hassle I have thoroughly enjoyed helping my kids concoct their costumes every year as they have moved from cute animal costumes through characters inspired by the books and movies they’ve loved.

We’ve had Jedi knights, superheroes, princesses, pirates, characters from video games, and this year, the Greek goddess Athena (speaking of pagan religions!).

As for me, I’m happy to work in a place where dressing up on Halloween is encouraged, because I love costumes. It’s true that some years I take the path of least resistance and just put on my Star Trek uniform shirt with a pair of black jeans because I’ve been so busy helping my kids with their costumes I have no time to think of my own. On the other hand, this year, since I was in the middle of teaching Julius Caesar in English 2201, I decided to go as Caesar in the middle of being stabbed on the Senate floor (hence the fake blood). I love that there’s a holiday that gives us a chance to celebrate creativity and costuming, and that is really the sum total of what Halloween “means to me” and to my family. And since I believe meaning is something we make, I’m fine with that.

As for the church’s approach to Halloween, again, I respect other people’s beliefs but I wish we could be a little less heavy-handed on the condemnation. As I said, when I was an Adventist kid growing up in St. John’s, I did not even know there was supposed to be any issue with Halloween. Then sometime during my elementary school years we had a church school teacher who informed the kids they shouldn’t be observing Halloween because it had pagan origins. We heard this the occasional time from other teachers and pastors over the years, but it was one of those things, like veganism, that we just assumed Adventists “from away” got worked up about. If they didn’t want their kids to go out trick or treating, that was their business, but they generally refrained from imposing their views on everyone else.

Over time, there came to be a bit of a “missionaries vs natives” divide over this, as there was with many things in the church of my youth. As the anti-Halloweeners grew more and more vocal, we eventually came to a place, in my early-parenting years, where most of those of us who’d grown up in our local church dressed up our kids and took them out trick or treating, while those who had either moved here from away, or were recent converts to Adventism, very vocally avoided the holiday. This reached somewhat of a crescendo one year when, on the Sabbath closest to Halloween, we were informed from the platform that if we allowed our children to go trick or treating we were “passing them through the flames” to sacrifice them to Satan (and a few parents got up and walked out of church).

I was composing this post while my students worked on an assignment this morning, and one of them, not knowing what I was writing about, came up to show me the following pic she’d snapped on her phone from someone’s door last nigh. It reminded me that people have all kinds of reasons to be preachy and judgmental, and some of them have nothing to do with religion:

Again, if you don’t observe Halloween, I totally respect your right to make that choice for yourself and your family. I hate it when people say to non-Halloweeners, “Oh, you’re depriving your children of a fun part of childhood, how cruel!” We all make choices for our families based on what we believe is right and wrong, and that inevitably results in some choices that are counter-cultural and even annoying to our own children (ask my kids about my current crusade to try to use only fair-trade chocolate in the house — it’s not what they’d choose, but I’m all about inconveniencing your kids in the name of a cause you genuinely believe is morally right, and that’s one of mine). I guess the only reason I feel the need to outline my own thinking on the subject, after years of being preached to about the evils of Halloween, is to clarify that my observance of Halloween has nothing to do with Satan, Samhain, the dead, or zombies, and everything to do with costumes and candy.

Book Reviews!

Writing Wednesday 54: Draw My (Writing) Life

For this week’s video I decided to have a little fun illustrating my life as a writer. A lot of YouTubers do these “Draw My Life” videos, a trend I wasn’t aware of till Chris did a really great one several months ago. While I don’t know that my actual life would make a very interesting video, I thought that people interested in the writing journey might like to see a writer’s life — illustrated.

Writing Wednesday 53: What You Don’t Want to Know

I’ve long said that the most useful advice in a critique of your work is the advice that accords with what you already know. Here I try to pick apart that idea and take it a step further. I think that often, in writing as in our everyday lives, we try to fool ourselves sometimes — tell ourselves that things are working when they really aren’t. It may take a nosy friend — or an honest critique partner — to make you face the unpleasant reality.

No Billboard Required

This week I had an experience that I usually have several times every fall. I took my little group of World Religions students to the local Hindu Temple for a talk and tour by a member of the Hindu community. The man who had given us our tour the last couple of years was out of the province and a woman I hadn’t met before greeted my students, showed them the temple, and talked for about 45 minutes about what Hindus believe and how they worship.

As we returned to school and over the next day or two as they talked about the visit and handed back their response sheets to me, I noticed the same absolutely predictable formula that I see every time I do one of these visits (I routinely take groups to a Shambhala Buddhist meditation centre, to the synagogue, and to the mosque as well as to the Hindu temple). Because the woman giving the tour was warm and friendly, students came away with a positive impression of Hinduism. I’ve seen this over and over — a friendly, likable presenter leaves students with the impression that theirs is a good religion, tolerant and promoting positive beliefs. If the presenter comes across as dismissive, judgemental, or rude in any way, students come away with a negative impression of the religion. They focus far less on what the religion actually teaches, than on the demeanour and attitude of the person telling them about it.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to me after years of growing up in church and hearing “You are the only Bible some people will ever read,” and “Your life is preaching the Gospel According to You” and similar slogans. But it struck me with extra force after a week when a few eyebrows were raised by a “Christian” billboard (sponsored by Answers in Genesis) appeared among the flashing ads in New York’s Times Square:

I guess that’s OK though, because those same “atheist friends” have long been in the business of winning hearts and minds through billboards themselves:

I wonder how many people have ever looked at a billboard and said, “I’ve been wrong all along! There is (or isn’t) a god!! I must change my entire worldview!!!”

I don’t think billboards are an effective way of changing the way people think, or even the way they view our religion (or lack thereof). And although I would hope that most people who are moving either towards or away from a particular religion give it more thought than my World Religions students give to a one-hour field trip, I do think my students are essentially on the right track. More right than the billboard-makers, at least.

There is simply no more effective “advertisement” for (or against) any religion or belief system, than the lives of the people who practice it.

That’s not to say that a lot of people around me are going to suddenly say, “Trudy seems like a decent person; I should become a Seventh-day Adventist!” It may be as simple as the fact that a well-lived life with genuine kindness and concern for others breaks down barriers. I’ve written before about the fact that the prejudice many Christians have against atheists never had a chance to get a foothold in my mind because of the loving and generous spirit of an atheist family member. The best defense against the belief that “all Muslims are terrorists” is a getting to know a decent, honourable Muslim neighbour or co-worker. And yes, if you’re a Christian, the best advertisement for your Christianity is not the pamphlet you distribute or the billboard you pay for, but the life you live.

This week’s social-media news out of the US has included not only the billboard kerfuffle, but news stories that have made me at the same time proud of one fellow Seventh-day Adventist who holds a high profile in American life, and embarrassed by the views of another high-profile Adventist. And that, along with the visit to the Hindu temple, has made me think a lot about how I represent my faith to those around me. No matter what your belief — or lack of belief — you probably underestimate how much people judge that belief system based on what they see in you. And, of course, in me.

 

Writing Wednesday 52: One Year

It’s been a year since I started this project. To see where I’m going from here, you can watch this week’s video. And add some comments below.

Searching Sabbath 28 (and final!): The New Earth

It’s the end of an era! OK, no, it’s just the end of my series of 28 videos exploring the 28 Fundamental Beliefs of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. I started this because it’s a requirement for the Master Guide certificate (the highest certification for lay youth leadership in the SDA church) that I’m working towards. But I also thought it would be useful for me, as a lifelong Adventist in midlife, to go back and take a closer look at the doctrines of the church to which I belong. I looked forward to (and enjoyed) some discussion with others about these issues as I posted the vlogs and accompanying blog posts here and on Facebook, and it has, indeed, been a valuable experience for me to re-evaluate and explore exactly what it is our church teaches, what I hold dear in those teachings, what I struggle with, and why. Thanks to all those who have joined me on this journey. The journey doesn’t stop, of course — I hope it never does — but the weekly videos will. I’ll still be searching, and I’ll still be observing Sabbaths, but as of now, Searching Sabbath (the video series) is at an end!

Writing Wednesday 51: Q and A

In this week’s Q and A episode I talk a bit about the inspiration to start writing, the fuel to keep going, and … The Ladies of Missalonghi.

Searching Sabbath 27: The Millennium

Second-last vlog in this series. I won’t deny that I’m getting eager for this series to end, not because I haven’t enjoyed doing them (I’ve particularly enjoyed the discussions with people in the comments) but because between this and my Writing Wednesday videos, I’m not getting much non-video blogging done, and I want to get back to doing some more of that. So this week’s vlog focuses on Adventist teaching about the end of time — what happens after the second coming. As always, there’s a lot more here to discuss than can be covered in a short video so I’m hoping to hear from you in the comments.

Writing Wednesday 50: Critiqual Condition

This week, for reasons explained in the video, I didn’t do a Q&A vlog like I intended to. Instead, I got a good critique of my novel, and a cold. And that’s all I have to say for today!