Happy Halloween!

Halloween at The Episcopal School is a joyous day filled with fun and imagination.  This is rooted in our Episcopal faith and our belief in the incarnation of God in Jesus; in him God meets us right where we are in all the joys and travails of our humanity.  Spirituality in the Episcopal Church really takes its cue from this insight.  If we want to connect with children with the love of God, we need to come to where they are.

Children live in a world of wonder and imagination.  They possess a keen spiritual sensitivity and live with a special capacity for creativity and play.   They already instinctively know God without adult interference.

At Halloween, the chapel program seeks to meet children right where they are by bringing the good news of God into their imaginative and creative lives.   So we encourage students to dress up in costumes and do something original.  We parade around in our costumes.  We laugh together, even as we pray.   We read from the prophet Ezekiel’s depiction of the “Valley of Dry Bones.” We pronounce a “blessing of the goblins”and pray for God’s whimsical joy to be our very own.

Of course all this theology is reinforced by the historical truth that Halloween is just the contemporary way of saying “All Hallow’s Eve,” which is the day before a major Feast Day in the Church—All Saints Day.  We still celebrate All Saints to this day in the church.   In the Middle Ages it was believed that saints came flooding into churches together in spirit on November 1.  This was a welcome event for the worshiping community!  In order to prevent evil spirits from blocking their visit, the faithful would dress up in costumes to effectively “scare off” the evil.  It was hospitality.

So this holiday has it all, both the historic religious dimension and the contemporary theological dimension.  It is just one more way we seek to call out and name the presence of God right in the midst of our everyday lives at school.