All Saints?

In a few days, most of the non-religious in our country will join the religious in a frenzy of fun, pumpkins, scary music, ghosts and goblins and way too much candy. For weeks now, Party City has been sending out flyers to entice us to buy costumes to wear to our parties. Walgreens and Kroger have had displays of bags of candy for us to give away to the little spooks who will be ringing our doorbells. Halloween is upon us!

This celebration of the day before or eve of a major feast day (from a Christian perspective) ranks near the madness of our celebration of the night before Christmas. Far more energy gets expended in preparing for All Hallow’s Eve and Christmas Eve than in observing the day following: All Saints Day and Christmas Day respectively. Perhaps that’s because for most Christians and non-religious, the next day isn’t nearly as much fun as the night before. And perhaps the meaning of the following day has been diluted.

Let’s take All Saints Day. No gifts are exchanged. No big meal planned. In most non-liturgical churches, there won’t be a special worship service. The origin of the marking 31 October in some special way, predates Christianity. I won’t go into that here. After Christianity was legalized and then made the state religion, pagan festivals were banned. There went the fun of 31 October.  In the 6^th century, the Church acquired the Pantheon in Rome. It had been used by pagans as a place to pray for their dead. But Pope Boniface IV, consecrated it to Mary and the Christian martyrs and praying for Christian dead became commonplace.

There had been a day set apart to remember saints, that is, martyrs, but it was in May. But, in its wisdom the Church moved the date of the celebration of All Hallows’ Day to--guess when--1 November, neatly substituting the pagan day to pray for the dead with the Christian day.

Before any of this happened, and not long after the first Christian died for the faith, local communities began to remember them on the anniversary of their death—their feast day. Quite often churches were built on or near the site of the martyrdom and named for the martyr. There was no master list being kept anywhere and most communities knew of their saints and perhaps a few nearby community saints, but it was clear not all martyrs were being honored. To remedy this, All Saint’s Day was created. For centuries the practice of remember them all on a single day was standard. Then some Church leader worried we might not be remembering all of them and 2 November was set aside as All Soul’s Day. All Souls Day was the day the Church remembered all the departed, including any saint that had been forgotten. These days these two feasts tend to blur together in our worship.

So, the bottom line, like Christmas, this is a religious festival which our culture had coopted and turned into a reason to indulge in fun, food, and games. I’m okay with that to the degree they would also remember the origins of the Christian reason for the day. Not likely to happen unless people such as you, gentle Christian reader, tell the story to your kids.

Peace, Jerry