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Saturday, Oct. 31, 2009

Halloween a precursor for religious holidays

Most everyone who has been down the candy aisle of the grocery store lately knows that today is a holiday — Halloween. But many don’t realize that Halloween is actually the pre-holiday.

Traditions surrounding Halloween date back more than 2,000 years to the Celts in Ireland. They marked the change from the harvest season to the cruel, dark winter by trying to scare away death with bonfires, costumes and trickery.

When Christianity spread to the Celtic lands in the 800s, Pope Gregory IV declared Nov. 1 as All Saints’ Day as an attempt to replace the pagan revelry with Christian meaning. All Hallow’s Eve, or Halloween, thus became a church-sanctioned day of vigil to prepare the faithful for this holy day.

So while Halloween gets all the attention, the real holidays, at least for the faithful, are Sunday and Monday. All Saint’s Day is celebrated by the church Nov. 1, and All Soul’s Day is the following day.

One of my favorite preachers, Barbara Brown Taylor, told in one of her sermons about the distinction between the two. She says, “On All Saints’ Day, we remember all those saints who have left a name, whose stories we know something about — St. Peter, St. Paul or St. Mary. Then, on All Souls’ Day, we remember all the faithful departed, whether they made a mark in the world or not, the saints who are known to God alone, like relatives and friends and the old woman across the street. Between the two, we come into communion with all those saints and souls who have gone before us, with all our kin, known or unknown, to whom we are related by Christ’s blood.”

The juxtaposition of these two holidays marks a wonderful truth about communities of the faithful. The fact is that some people live remarkable lives of faith. They are publicly recognized for their acts of kindness and justice, or for their leadership or their righteousness. These are the folks that we celebrate on All Saints’ Day.

But the vast majority of the faithful are unrecognized heroes. Each congregation is filled with them — the Sunday School teachers, the women who rock the babies in the nursery, the men who mow the lawns of the elderly, those who bake casseroles to share with the bereaved.

Barbara Brown Taylor went on to say, “The reality is that all of us who have been baptized are already saints, have already been given our halos, because all it takes to be a saint is to belong to God. ... Once you have linked up with Christ’s body, once you have been baptized in his name and shared his body and blood, you have everything you need to be a saint. You have your identity, your halo and a choice: to live as who you are or not.”

Yes, more times than not, it is the unrecognized heroes who carry on the work of God’s kingdom.

Our faith is founded on the experiences of ordinary people who do not change the world in huge waves but by small ripples of faith. Each of us can be a saint, recognized or not. Each of us can be a hero of the faith, if only we choose to live our lives as children of God, faithfully serving where God calls us.

The Rev. Julie Long is the Minister of Children and Families at First Baptist Church of Christ in Macon.