Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 61

Writing Wednesday 58: Write Every Day … or not

If you’re a writer or an aspiring writer, you’ve no doubt heard at some point that in order to be a “real” writer, you have to WRITE EVERY DAY, without fail, regardless of what else is going on in your life. Well, I’m a real writer, and I do not write every day. That is, there are times when I write every day, and times, like right now, when I’m not writing at all. Watch the video to find out my take on the “write every day” advice.

Clay Feet

I’m not sure what kind of media/social-media environment you swim in, but in my world, nothing is happening this week except the death of Nelson Mandela. And that’s as it should be, I think — he was, by any reckoning, one of the towering figures of the late 20th century, an inspiration to many. His death and people’s responses to his death should be news.

That said, I’m pretty sure it won’t be long before people start popping up (in some quarters they probably already have, though it’s all dignified respect and mourning in the circles I inhabit) to remind us of Mandela’s personal shortcomings and political failures. The details don’t even matter now: he was human; he was flawed. As soon as people try to elevate him to the level of sainthood, others will be quick to expose those flaws and point to them as evidence that he’s really not worth our admiration.

To be honest I was thinking about this blog post even before Mandela died. I was showing my World Religions class the movie Luther as part of our unit on Christianity, and thinking about how much I admired Martin Luther. Then I thought about how in the previous unit, on Judaism, I’d been teaching about the roots of antisemitism, and thought, “Wow, what a shame Luther was so nastily anti-Jewish, and his words have been used to justify such terrible antisemitism.”

Then I thought about honouring one of my personal heroes, C.S. Lewis, on the 50th anniversary of his death, and thought about how he was a good old-fashioned misogynist who thought the patriarchy was a grand thing and didn’t even question his attitudes towards women.

And within the last couple of months I’ve seen Facebook friends post articles about how Mother Teresa not only suffered from depression that made her doubt God, but as a bonus, she may also have mismanaged funds, and prioritized helping the poor die over helping them live, and how Gandhi had these troubling sexual proclivities including exploiting young girls by making them sleep naked with him to test his committment to celibacy.

And that’s just a fairly random sampling of people I personally admire, who have been dead long enough that it’s safe to talk about their shortcomings.

There never has been and never will be a public figure widely lauded as “good” about whom people won’t be able to dig up dirt, because we are all human, and flawed. All our idols have feet of clay. And while we sometimes write off the dark side of our heroes with phrases like, “Well, he was a man of his time,” or “a product of his culture” or whatever, that really doesn’t cut it. Often these are real, damaging dark sides, and the very reason we admire these people is because they transcended their time and their culture. It’s right to be disappointed and angry when our heroes let us down, because their flaws are very real.

Another layer of the disappointment, beyond the personal, is the sense that the beliefs they represented — whether that be Christianity, or some other religion, or a humanist philosophy — should have made them better. The flaws of our heroes cause us to question not only these men and women themselves but what they stood for, because how could their beliefs really have been real and effective while still leaving them so damaged?

Despite all these I’ve decided to embrace the fact that my heroes are flawed. I don’t mean that I embrace the flaws themselves — antisemitism is just as ugly when it comes from Martin Luther’s pen as from Hitler’s, and just as wrong. Rather, I embrace the fact that the same person can have a beautiful idea and also an ugly one. That a human being can do right and also do wrong. I embrace this reality and am even grateful for it for two reasons.

First, it disabuses me of the tendency to make idols, to substitute creature for Creator and hero-worship anyone. Only God is perfect, and worthy of my worship. With my fellow humans, I can admire things they did, or said, or wrote … but recognize that they themselves are as fallen and flawed and in need of redemption as I am. Which leads me to the second and probably more important point …

If I believe in saints and flawless heroes, then it seems pretty evident that I’m not one, and don’t have to be. God only calls and uses superheroes, perfect people with no dark sides or hangups. Therefore, God can’t possibly be calling me to do anything spectacular, because I’m not one of those special people.

But if God uses flawed, damaged people who make terrible mistakes and get things wrong … well then, God might just be planning to use me.

The books of November

More detailed reviews of all these books are available over at my book review blog, Compulsive Overreader. It’s been a great month for reading and I’m already getting excited about what books will make it to my Top Ten of 2013 list!!

Accomplishment (with mixed feelings)

So yesterday was, you know, Kind of a Big Deal day for me. I’ve been involved with the Pathfinder Club, the youth organization of the Seventh-day Adventist Church (not to be confused with Pathfinders, a level of Girl Guides), off and on since I was 9. I’ve been a Pathfinder, a counsellor, an Adventurer leader (that’s the younger-kids division of the club); I’ve taught numerous honours and been Co-director of our local Pathfinder Club. What I’ve never been, till yesterday, is a Master Guide, which is the highest level of leadership in that organization. Yesterday at church Jason and I and some of our fellow church members who’ve been working towards that goal, all earned our Master Guide pins and scarves.

It was a surprising amount of work. If you’ve been involved in youth leadership in general and Pathfinders in particular for many years, as I have, then about half the requirements are ones that you’ve already done. The rest are ones that you look down through the requirement sheet and go, “Oh, I can do that.” And you can, but it’s actually much more time-consuming than you think. Our Master Guide leader decided that anyone who had done about 70-80% of the requirements and planned to keep working on them, could get invested as a Master Guide, but I had one of my rare bursts of perfectionism and decided I had to have every single requirement completed before the program ended (probably because I knew if I didn’t impose that deadline on myself, I’d never get it finished).

So, it’s an accomplishment I’m very proud of. But it’s not one I approach without mixed feelings, for three reasons:

1) It’s the highest level of youth leadership in a church that I have belonged to all my life and love deeply, but with which I frequently find myself in disagreement (especially with current world church leadership). I am a strong believer in the fact that if you love an organization you stick with it through good times and bad and try to effect change from within, but I know it’s discouraging sometimes to be aware that even as I’m receiving this hard-earned honour from my church, there are people in that church who consider me “not a good Adventist” because of some of the questions I’ve been known to raise and the doubts I struggle with.

2) After a lifetime in church youth leadership, now finding myself the parent of two teenagers, I find myself questioning, “How do we measure success in youth work?” For a lot of years I think I bought into the belief, at least partly, that youth leaders had done a good job if kids stayed in the church. But as I look back at my own crop of friends who went through Pathfinders with me as a teen, and all the young people I’ve led through Pathfinders and youth Sabbath School in the decades since, I see the same mixed bag of people who stayed in church, people who left, people who left but came back, people who stayed for years then suddenly left in midlife … for all I know some of them could be coming back when they’re in their 60s. And there was nothing predictable about anyone’s trajectory — the kids who were the most “on fire” and active in youth programs were sometimes those who left not only our church but God and all religion behind them, while some of the most unlikely and unpromising candidates ended up becoming pillars in the church. For now, anyway. All of which is to say that life is a lot longer and stranger than I thought it was going to be, and everyone’s journey has twists and turns, and there is no point at which, as a parent or teacher or youth leader, you can say, “Ah! I have produced a Finished Product. This young person is now Complete, and All is Well.” More and more I’m coming around to the belief that if, as an adult, you can be one positive, encouraging influence in a young person’s life — one of the people who adds to them rather than takes away — you’ve done as much as you can expect to do. Which is not to say that I no longer think youth work is worthwhile — I still do it, still love it, and still believe in it — but my perception of what it means and what its aims are has shifted over the years.

3) This may sound ridiculous coming from a 48-year-old, but I have never in my entire life received any kind of honour, accolade or award, no matter how insignificant, without my mom being in the audience. Seriously, not ever. And while my dad was there yesterday, faithfully taking pictures (as were my kids, when I told them “This is important to me!” and my husband who was receiving the same honour right alongside me) … still, there are some absences that can’t be ignored. My mom would have been there. And she wasn’t. And I think that’s going to hurt every single time something good happens to me for the rest of my life. So, there’s that.

But with all those caveats in place, I’m still pretty pleased to have finished the Master Guide program and be able to wear those multicoloured stripes on my Pathfinder scarf!

Dear Bell Mobility

My kids have cellphones. I bought each one of them a phone when they reached junior high, on the assumption that at that stage of life they’d be spending more time away from home and school, with friends, and I’d need an easy way to contact them. I love the convenience of being able to text or call when I need to pick them up somewhere or just check in with them.

What I don’t love is the idea of my kids having 24/7  access to the internet. I don’t think they should be able to check Facebook or use Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter or any one of a number of other social media applications, wherever and whenever they want.

So when my oldest got his phone, I talked to the helpful person at the Bell Aliant desk in the mall and she told me I could easily request to have data blocked on my kid’s phone. That way, he could only use his phone to access the internet when he was in an area that had wi-fi. That was perfect for me, especially as the two places he spent the most time — home and school — didn’t have wi-fi.

I’m not naive, Bell Mobililty. I don’t believe that any one thing I do is going to protect my children from the horrors of cyber-bullying, sexting, and all the other new, high-tech ways kids have found to perpetrate the same behavior they used to do in person. I take what I think are sensible precautions: I keep the one internet-enabled computer in our house in the parents’ bedroom where anyone can see it, and it has no webcam; I don’t (for now) have wi-fi in the house; I talk to my kids about responsible behavior online, and I give them smartphones that, in most cases, can’t be used to send or receive data, only to make calls and text. Even then, obviously, if they’re determined enough to misuse their internet privileges, they’ll find a way. But at least I can make it harder for them.

I’m a bit mystified, to be honest, by parents who wring their hands about the stuff kids are getting up to online, yet at the same time want to provide their kids with every imaginable electronic toy and endless access to the internet. People, it’s OK to not let your kids have every cool thing. It’s OK to give them a cheap, crappy phone with no data plan if that makes it harder for them to circulate incriminating or indecent pictures of their friends or enemies or frenemies … or of themselves. While you can’t keep them in a glass bubble, you can certainly throw a few roadblocks up on the road to perdition.

So when my daughter got her phone at the beginning of Grade 7, almost two years ago, I asked for the same arrangement as I had on my son’s phone — no data — and was told that was no problem. And for the last year and a half my daughter has had no internet access on her phone except when we go to a place with wi-fi, where she sometimes checks Facebook or downloads a game.

A few days ago, my daughter said, “Mom, my phone is showing the wi-fi symbol lit up even in places where I know there’s no wi-fi.” As it turns out, good people at Bell, her phone wasn’t getting wi-fi, it was just getting data from your network, the same as my husband’s phone and mine do. Data we were going to get charged for even though we’d had it blocked for over a year; more importantly, data that would give her unrestricted internet access.

Yesterday I called Bell Mobility and explained the situation. The customer service rep said, “Oh, data’s not blocked on that account; it never has been.” I knew this was wrong but frankly I don’t have the time and energy to argue about mysteries in the cyber-past. What interested me most was what she said next: “You’ll have to pay a dollar a month to block data on that phone. Your son’s account was set up in 2010; back then you could block data for free, but now it costs a dollar a month to do it.”

I’m sorry, what??? I know that data costs money. I’m resigned to the $50 a month data plan my husband and I pay for on our iPhones, even though I don’t think it’s a very good deal. But you’re telling me that not only would I have to pay if my kids accessed data on their phones – I also have to pay for them NOT to access it?!?! It costs to get data, and it also costs not to get it? That’s the definition of “got you coming and going.”

But what really burns me is that you are charging me for taking a simple step to help protect my child’s internet safety and privacy. I have to pay $12/year to make it more difficult for my kid to be cyberbullied, or to cyberbully anyone else. If the telecommunications industry has any shred of decency or desire to help control some of the myriad problems their devices have helped to cause, surely this is a service that should be offered free, at least to parents paying for the cellphone account of a kid under 18. In fact, I think “no-data” plans should be the default for underage kids, and parents need to have a very good and compelling reason to give their kids internet access in the palm of their hand 24 hours a day. But maybe that’s just me.

Of course I’m going to pay the $1 a month to have data blocked. But I’m also going to take a moment to say: Bell Mobility, this is a stupid policy. You can do better than this.

Mentor

When I was only in my 20s and a little more sensitive about age than I am now, November 22 rolled around and I mentioned to my students that it was (then) the 25th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an event that had marked a milestone for those who lived through it. “Miss, where were you when JFK was shot?” one of the students asked.

I was 23 at the time, born in 1965, so I fixed him with a steely glare and said, “I was not yet a gleam in my father’s eye.”

These days, though — or this day, particularly – I’m more likely to remember November 22 for other reasons.  Three famous people (and probably loads of less-famous ones) died on November 22, 1963. The deaths of the others were somewhat eclipsed by the assassination of the American president, but JFK’s deathday is shared with two great though very different writers: Aldous Huxley and Clive Staples Lewis.

It is, of course, Lewis that I feel drawn to talk about on the 50th anniversary of his death. This is a repost, with very few revisions, of a post I made five years ago on this date. I felt the need to pay some kind of tribute to a writer who shaped my faith and my worldview possibly more than any other.

I’m hardly unique in this.  Quite apart from the massive popularity of the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis’s other works — especially, I’d guess, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Great Divorce — are among the ones that many, many Christians credit with informing and shaping their faith, maybe even with bringing them to belief in the first place.

Well, I can’t give old Jack that kind of credit:  unlike him, I was a cradle believer, born and raised in church.  I first encountered Lewis through the Narnia books when I was nine, and I loved them. I totally got the Christian allegory and the parallels between Aslan and Jesus, just as my children did when I read the book to them. I think if you’ve been steeped in that story from birth it’s not hard to recognize when it appears in allegory, and Jesus in lion’s clothing is still comforting and familiar, which is one of the reasons Narnia felt so right to me. There were fauns and dwarves and talking animals, but God was there, the same God I knew from church, so nothing could go too badly wrong, even in The Last Battle.

I was in my mid-teens when I was introduced to the rest of Lewis’s work, through Mere Christianity first and then Screwtape.  Reading those books was a turning-point for me; at an age when many young churchgoers start losing their faith, mine was firmly cemented and I think that was due more to Lewis’s influence than anyone else’s, though there were obviously many contributing factors. 

Someone on a Ship of Fools discussion wondered once why Lewis’s writings are so beloved by conservative evangelicals when the man himself was a rather middle-of-the-road Anglican who believed and practiced quite a lot of things that most evangelicals don’t (and I would put a lot of Seventh-day Adventist Lewis fans, like myself, in this category).  I think it’s because a lot of people share my experience: for me, C.S. Lewis was the first writer who showed me how to be an intelligent, thinking Christian.

I’m lucky in that I didn’t grow up in a church or a family that taught me that Christian faith and intelligence were incompatible.  I know people who did grow up feeling that way, and that was not my experience. I knew it was important to have a strong faith, and also to be as smart as possible and think critically about the world around you.  But — how do I explain this exactly? I got the feeling — much more implicitly than explicitly, and certainly not directly from my parents, but perhaps from the church culture — that while you could be both a devout Seventhday  Adventist Christian AND an intelligent critical thinker, it was best to keep those parts of your brain in two separate boxes.  Faith should be informed, certainly, by an intelligent reading of the Bible but not much else; it wasn’t a good idea to apply too many of your critical faculties to the things you learned in church. Save the intellect for school and the outside world; don’t read or think too deeply into things that might challenge your faith.  Some books were perceived as dangerous; some questions shouldn’t be asked.

C.S. Lewis was, for me (and I suspect for many other smart, curious young evangelicals, hence his enduring popularity with that population) the one who blew a hole in all that, who said, “Look, of course you can be an intelligent Christian, and not only that, your Christian faith will stand up to intellectual scrutiny.  You have nothing to be intellectually ashamed of in your faith: it will stand up to question and analysis.  You don’t have to be afraid to think and question: the truth is sturdy enough to survive your doubts and questions and those of your atheist friends.”

This was a breath of fresh air to me.  There are many things in my theology and in my private approach to faith that I owe to my readng of various Lewis books in my formative years, but the thing that endures, the thing at the foundation of it all, was this view of Christian faith as a sturdy and respectable thing that could endure hard qustions and doubts, rather than the fragile creature, in need of protection and delicate handling, that my childhood church had sometiems made me feel faith was.

Fortunately, this intellectual sturdiness allowed me, in the end, to question Lewis himself and allow him to be less than perfect. As a Seventh-day Adventist, I recognized as early as The Last Battle that he was wrong about the state of the dead, for example — but you couldn’t blame him for that, being an Anglican.  Later I saw other holes in his reasoning, other points where I disagreed with him. For example, I believed for many years that his “Lord, liar or lunatic” formula was a good proof for the divinity of Christ: now I recognize that he left out a lot of options by boiling something so complex down to so simple a formula, and that very few well-read people today would be convinced by that argument.  I can recognize and disagree with his views on the role of women and on many other issues, and still honour him for the tremendous influence he had on my thinking and on my faith. 

When we speak of mentors it’s usual to speak of people we’ve known and worked with in real life, but in fact a lot of my mentors were dead before I ever met them and C.S. Lewis is first among them. I don’t know if I would still be a Christian today if I hadn’t read Mere Christianity at sixteen: I know I would not be the same Christian I am today.

In later years, I have had to deal with different doubts and questions, and turned to other mentors for teaching and support. In the doubts of my late 30s and early 40s, another Anglican writer from Great Britain filled much the same role in my intellectual life that C.S. Lewis did in my teens and twenties; that was the former Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright.  So it was with great interest that I read an article by Wright about Lewis, paying tribute to Lewis’s legacy while at the same time disagreeing with him on several points.  Many of Wright’s criticisms of Lewis are ones I also share, but I agree with Wright’s assessment that Lewis, somehow, got it right.  He made it work — at least, he made it work for me.

I’ve mentioned before my cripping shyness around people I admire, as for example on an occasion a few years ago when I was in a room with the great Adventist scholar and writer George Knight and could not bring myself to tell him how much his writing has meant to me.  I’m sure if I’m ever in a room with N.T. Wright, the same tongue-tiedness will overcome me and I will say onthing at all.

But fortunately, I will not run into C.S. Lewis in this life, and I’m sure that by the time I do meet him, not only my sins but my imperfections will have been taken away (as will his). I will no longer be afraid to say what’s in my heart because I will no longer care about looking like a fool. 

All that will be behind me, and I will wait a few hundred years tilll all the other people who want to talk to him have said their thank-yous.  Then I will seek him out in some quiet corner of heaven (he would probably prefer it was a pub, but the existence of pubs in heaven is something we’ll have to leave to God). One of the things that makes me cry about re-posting this is that when I posted it five years ago, I got a lovely comment from my friend Jamie about how Lewis’s writings had influenced him. Jamie is dead too now, and it gives me a little comfort to think that perhaps in heaven we’ll go together to look up C.S. Lewis. When we find him, in a heavenly pub or wherever else, I’ll say “Thank you.  Thank you for teaching me to be a thinking Christian; thank you for Narnia; thank you for dragging the sorry ass of my teenage faith out of the ditch of doubt. Thank you, even, for not being perfect and not being right about everything, so that I was never tempted to confuse the servant with his Master, and make a god of another human being who had simply walked the road before me and was able to give me a few pointers along the way.  Thank you so much, Dr. Lewis.”

Even in heaven, I doubt I’ll be able to call him Jack.

Writing Wednesday 57: How Can You Tell? (No Shoops)

Remember that old song (“The ‘Shoop Shoop’ Song”) that asks, “Does he love me, I wanna know, how can I tell if he loves me so?”

It’s not that complicated, really. Spoiler: it’s not in his kiss.

A more relevant question for writers might be, “How can I tell if my manuscript is ready to send out?” That one, unfortunately, is more complicated.

Writing Wednesday 56: Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

And, knowing I could not travel both,

But being a writer, long I stood,

And looked down both, as far as I could

At all the stuff in the undergrowth.

And then I came here to tell you about it.

Actually, starting out as a young writer, I never seriously considered self-publishing. Thirty years ago, that wasn’t an obvious path. True, some writers, even back then, published with “vanity presses” or simply paid a printer to print copies of their book which they then went about peddling to stores. But before the advent of online print-on-demand services and e-books, it was seen as a sort of last-ditch option for people who couldn’t hope to get their books accepted by a traditional publisher. The expense and effort involved was rarely worth it for most writers.

Today it’s a different world — a world of social media, self-promotion, e-books, and widespread self-publishing. I’m definitely biased in favour of traditional publishing but I can see some advantages and disadvantages to both platforms and I respect writers’ decisions to self-publish. Even for me, there are situations in which I might just consider releasing a self-published e-book … but you’ll have to wait to hear about that!

Writing Wednesday 55: Blurred (Genre) Lines

Some thoughts about a popular young-adult series and the way it “breaks the rules” of the genre got me to thinking about whether there are even any rules to genres. And in some cases it’s clear there are rules. If you write a book where two people fall in love but end up never getting together and being broken hearted, don’t try to call that a romance and send it to a romance publisher. If you write a novel where a crime is committed but no-one ever solves it, I don’t think you could sell it as a mystery novel. If your main character is 65 and there’s no character under 20 who even makes an appearance in your book, it probably won’t sell as YA.

That said, lines between genres are often blurrier than we think, and many very successful books are hard to categorize. So, I talk about that for about five minutes in this video, and include an 8.5 second clip which makes my kids want to disown me. Teenagers are hilarious because they’re so easy to embarrass.

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.