I used to live a few houses away from what appeared to be a lovely elderly couple. For months out of the year they could be seen in the evenings enjoying each other’s company on their front porch. As soon as the calendar turned to October though, something bizarre happened. Their picturesque home was transformed into a horrorscape featuring severed heads, mangled bodies, and life sized characters from horror films. Halloween was approaching.
This glorification of death and horror is an unfortunate feature of a sickening western culture unhinged from its Christian roots. For many people, there is a temptation either to flee the thing altogether, rejecting everything Halloween as unholy, or to embrace it wholesale and be just like everyone else. But the proper Christian approach, the thoroughly Catholic spirit of the season, is to celebrate the great three days of Allhallowtide with a piety and defiance that just might shock our friends and neighbors even more than a thirty-foot tall skeleton in the front yard.
Late October and the full month of November are a season of special focus on death and on our honored and beloved dead. The scriptures admonish us, “remember your last days, and you will not sin” (Sirach 7:36), and the Catholic spiritual tradition points out tempus fugit; memento mori (time flies; remember death). The fear of death makes us slaves (see Hebrew 2:15). Rather than fear death and flee from it, the Eve of All Saints Day invites us to ponder death, our own inevitable end, so as to be prepared for it and thereby not to be afraid of it. It is a time to make a holy mockery of death: “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55).
After a day of pondering our own end, we celebrate with solemnity all those holy men and women who have already tasted death, many of them quite eagerly. They all knew that death was not the end, that it had no real power over them. Because Jesus overcame death and gave them a share in his death through Baptism, the saints all knew that death could do nothing to them. It had no sting and could experience no victory. These models of perseverance and faith are the ultimate punchline to the joke that is physical death. Mortal beings need not fear their mortality.
But we are mortal, and we do experience the temporary separation of death. And so the final day of this autumn triduum focuses our attention on our beloved dead still undergoing purification. These holy souls experiencing purgatory are assured of one day moving up a day in the liturgical calendar from All Souls Day to All Saints Day. Even though death has physically if temporarily separated them from us, we are reminded that the salvation bestowed on us in Baptism is so real that you cannot even die out of Jesus’ Church. This is such an important truth of revelation that we take the entirety of the month of November to visit cemeteries and pray for the dead, realizing that they are not really separated from us. They are proof that death cannot do any real harm to us.
Neighbors will go overboard with the glorification of gore and horror and evil. The devil may have his night with toilet papered trees, egged houses, and smashed pumpkins. But that is the best he can hope for: toilet paper and eggs, spoiled produce, and giant skeletons and heads made out of plastic. The Chrsitian can stare these trinkets in the face and laugh at them, mock them even, seeing how pathetic they really are. We need not be scared of the dark because the Light of the World has defeated it so soundly that it takes three full days and the better part of an entire month to recall it each year.
We need not be distressed by the gore out there since we will one day join those who “have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:14). In a world populated by the walking dead, we follow the God who says, “I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord” (Ezekiel 37:6). Death is nothing to fear. We need this autumn triduum of All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day to remind us of this fact.
