Halloween:Orthodoxy and Secular Culture

On the evening before October 19 (Nov. 2), 1964, the Russian Church Abroad celebrated the solemn canonization of Father John of Kronstadt, whom Vladyka John Maximovitch loved. Vladyka had even been involved in compiling of the service and akathist to him.

A group of Russians organized on this night a Halloween Ball. When the All Night Vigil celebrated to St. John of Kronstadt began, many people were absent, to the great sorrow of Vladyka. After the service, St. John went to the place where the ball was being held. He entered the hall and the music stopped as Vladyka, in absolute silence, glared at the people, and with his staff in hand, he slowly walked around the entire hall. He didn’t speak, but the sight of Vladyka brought general consternation to the party. Vladyka left but the next day in church he called all to the devout Christian life.

In some ways, talking to an Orthodox group about Halloween is like what we use to call “preaching to the choir.” In other words, non-participation in Halloween should be a “no-brainer.” Yet, I believe that the issue of Halloween is an example of a more fundamental struggle between Orthodoxy and the secular spirit of our age. What I hope to accomplish in this speech is for us to begin to understand the cause and the nature of this struggle and begin to gain some idea of how to deal with it.

Origins of Halloween
First, on the slim chance that some of you are unfamiliar with its origin, I will present some basic facts about Halloween. Fr. Victor Potapov relates this history: “The feast of Halloween began among the Celtic peoples of Britain, Ireland, and northern France. These pagan peoples believed that physical life was born from death. Therefore, they celebrated the beginning of the “new year” in the fall (on the eve of October 31 and into the day of November 1), when they believed, the season of cold, darkness, decay and death began. The Celts believed that a certain deity, whom they called Samhain, [pronounced - sow-in ] was the Lord of Death. To him they gave honor at their New Year’s festival

Many beliefs and practices were associated with this feast, which have endured to this current time. On the eve of the New Year’s festival, the Druids, who were the priests of the Celtic cult, instructed their people to extinguish all hearth fires and lights. On the evening of the festival they ignited a huge bonfire built from oak branches, which they believed to be sacred. Upon this fire, they offered burnt sacrifices of crops, animals, and even human beings to appease and cajole Samhain, the lord of Death. They also believed that Samhain, being pleased by their faithful offerings, allowed the souls of the dead to return to homes for a festal visit on this day. This belief led to the ritual practice of wandering about in the dark dressed in costumes indicating ghosts, witches, hobgoblins, fairies and demons. The living entered into fellowship and communion with their dead by this ritual act of imitation, through costume and the wandering about in the darkness, even as the souls of the dead were believed to wander.

The dialogue of “trick or treat” is integral to Halloween beliefs and practices. The souls of the dead had–by Celtic tradition–entered into the world of darkness, decay, and death. They bore the affliction of great hunger on their festal visit. This belief brought about the practice of begging as another Celtic ritual imitation of the dead. The implication was that any souls of the dead and their imitators who are not appeased with “treats”, i.e. offerings, will provoke the wrath of Samhain, whose angels and servants (the souls and human imitators) could retaliate through a system of “tricks” or curses. One radio commentator takes great fun in calling Halloween, “Begoween.”

The sacred fire was the fire of the New Year was taken home to rekindle lights and hearth fires. This developed into the practice of the Jack O Lantern (in the U.S.A.; a pumpkin, in older days other vegetables were used), which was carved in imitation of the dead and used to convey the new light and fire to the home, where the lantern was left burning throughout the night.

Divination was also part of this ancient Celtic festival. After the fire had died out the Druids examined the remains of the main sacrifices, hoping to foretell the coming year’s events. The Halloween festival was the proper night for sorcery, fortune telling, divination, games of chance, and Satan worship and witchcraft in the later Middle Ages.

The Church Responds
In the strictly Orthodox early Celtic Church, the holy Fathers tried to counteract this pagan new year festival that honored the Lord of Death, by establishing the Feast of All Saints on the same day. (It differs in the East, where the Feast of All Saints is celebrated on the Sunday following Pentecost). The custom of the Celtic Church was for the faithful Christians to attend a vigil service and a morning celebration of the Holy Eucharist. This custom created the term Halloween. The Old English of “All Hallow E’en”, i.e., the eve commemorating all those who were hallowed (sanctified) became Halloween.

The remaining pagan and therefore anti-Christian people, whose paganism had become deeply intertwined with the Occult, Satanism and Magic, reacted to the Church’s attempt to supplant their festival by increased fervor on this evening. The early medieval Halloween became the supreme feast of the Occult, a night and day witchcraft, demonism, sorcery and Satanism of all kinds. Many practices involved desecration and mockery of Christian practices and beliefs. Costumes of skeletons developed as a mockery of the Church’s reverence for Holy Relics; Holy things were stolen, such as crosses and the Reserved Sacrament, and used perversely in sacrilegious ways. The practice of begging became a system of persecution to harass Christians who were, by their beliefs, unable to participate with offerings to those who served the Lord of Death. The Western Church ’s attempt failed, to supplant this pagan festival with the Feast of All Saints.”

-Fr. John Moses

Read the entire article at allsaintsofamerica.org

Become All Flame

“Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?’ then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, ‘If you will, you can become all flame.’ -The Desert Fathers

The Daily Invocation of the Saints

“What does the daily invocation of the saints signify — of different ones each day, during the whole year, and during our whole life? It signifies that God’s saints — as our brethren, but perfect — live, and are near us, ever ready to help us, by the grace of God. We live together with them in the house of our Heavenly Father, only in different parts of it. We live in the earthly, they in the heavenly half; but we can converse with them, and they with us. God’s saints are near to the believing heart, and are ready in a moment to help those who call upon them with faith and love.” — Saint John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ

Listen to Saint of the Day on Ancient Faith Radio.

Expieriences of Dread Leading to Everlasting Truth

“Understanding of the Lord’s ways does not come quickly. It was anguish to me to think how brief was our time here. My soul was filled with dread at the idea of going to the grave before God answered my cries to Him. But I was not finally left desolate: because of my prayer of positive belief in Christ-God His compassion for fallen mankind was gradually transmitted to me, too. My sense of being doomed caused me agony and this agony cracked the walls of my stony heart. As I was accustomed to apply my expieriences to all mankind, I felt pity for all who, like me, were distanced from God. Thus humanity’s sufferings became mine, and in the solitude of desert prayer would come to me for the whole world as for myself. And in that prayer I sensed the eternal God as our Father. And this feeling was convincing witness to the everlasting Truth as conveyed to us by Christ.”- Archimandrite Sophrony

Caution in Speech

“During conversation with others it is no hindrance to be cautious in speech, and at the same time one can retain the Jesus prayer in the mind.” -St. Hilarian of Optina

“If you take into consideration only your tongue, how much evil has been spoken by it- abuse against God, condemnation of neighbors, complaining, joking, blasphemy, gossip, bad language, swearing, and so on! And has one day in the year passed by in which we have not sinned with our tongue, forgetting that we will have to give account to God for every idle word? Therefore the Lord God, thinking of our correction and salvation, sends sorrows, due to which a person finds difficult not only to take part in idle chatter, but also to speak about serious matters”- St. Anthony of Optina

A Land of Imbeciles

“Anyone who looks at our contemporary life from the perspective of the normal life lived by people in earlier times—say, Russia, or America, or any country of Western Europe in the 19th century—cannot help but be struck by the fact of how abnormal life has become today. The whole concept of authority and obedience, of decency and politeness, of public and private behavior—all have changed drastically, have been turned upside down except in a few isolated pockets of people—usually Christians of some kind—who try to preserve the so-called “old-fashioned” way of life.

Our abnormal life today can be characterized as spoiled, pampered. From infancy today’s child is treated, as a general rule, like a little god or goddess in the family: his whims are catered to, his desires fulfilled.; he is surrounded by toys, amusements, comforts; he is not trained and brought up according to strict principles of Christian behavior, but left to develop whichever way his desires incline. It is usually enough for him to say, “I want it!” or “I won’t do it!” for his obliging parents to bow down before him and let him have his way. Perhaps this does not happen all the time in every family, but it happens often enough to be the rule of contemporary childrearing, and even the best-intentioned parents do not entirely escape its influence. Even if the parents try to raise the child strictly, the neighbors are trying to do something else. They have to take that into consideration when disciplining the child.

When such a child becomes an adult, he naturally surrounds himself with the same things he was used to in his childhood: comforts, amusements, and grown-up toys. Life becomes a constant search for “fun” which, by the way, is a word totally unheard of in any other vocabulary; in 19th century Russia they wouldn’t have understood what this word meant, or any serious civilization. Life is a constant search for “fun” which is so empty of any serious meaning that a visitor from any 19th-century country, looking at our popular television programs, amusement parks, advertisements, movies, music—at almost any aspect of our popular culture—would think he had stumbled across a land of imbeciles who have lost all contact with normal reality. We don’t often take that into consideration, because we are living in this society and we take it for granted.” – Blessed Fr. Seraphim Rose

Close Your Mouth

Our Lord instructed us to pray in secret – this means, in our heart – and also to ’shut the door’. What is this door he says we must shut, if not the mouth? For we are the temple in which Christ dwells, for so the Apostle said, ‘You are temples of the Lord’ (1 Cor 3.16). The Lord enters into your inner self, into this house, to cleanse it from everything that is unclean; but only when the door, that is your mouth, is closed shut.
- Aphrahat the Persian

True Life Starts Here

Where did true death – the death that produces and induces in soul and body both temporal and eternal death – have its origin? Was it not in the realm of life? Thus was man, alas, at once banished from God’s paradise, for he had imbued his life with death and made it unfit for paradise. Consequently true life – the life that confers immortality and true life on both soul and body – will have its origin here, in this place of death. If you do not strive here to gain this life in your soul, do not deceive yourself with vain hopes about receiving it hereafter.
- St Gregory Palamas

Evangelicals Turn Toward the Orthodox Church

“When Wilbur Ellsworth ministered at First Baptist, a typical Sunday service–held inside the church’s immense but unadorned white-walled, burgundy-carpeted sanctuary–went something like this: Wearing a suit and tie, Ellsworth would stand at a pulpit and preach. Aside from occasionally rising in prayer and joining the church choir and orchestra in some traditional Protestant hymns, the congregants would largely refrain from any activity during the one-hour-and-15-minute service–except for once a month, when they would receive communion.

The service Ellsworth now leads at Holy Transfiguration, by contrast, has an entirely different feel. Wearing his priestly vestments and standing inside the church’s small sanctuary–which boasts yellow walls covered with hundreds of tiny iconic pictures of saints and Oriental rugs on the floor–Ellsworth conducts much of the service from behind the iconostasis (or icon wall) where he is out of view of the congregation. The congregants stand for most of the two-hour service, constantly prostrating and crossing themselves, and the only music is rhythmic Byzantine chanting. At the end of the service, they file up to the front of the sanctuary–as they do every Sunday–and take communion. It’s easy to see how, for someone reared in an evangelical church, the Orthodox Church might seem like something not just from another culture, but another world.

And yet it is precisely that otherworldliness that is part of what is attracting a growing number of evangelicals to the Orthodox Church. Since the late nineteenth century, when fundamentalism emerged as a response to the increasing cosmopolitanism of mainline Protestant denominations, evangelicalism has been an anti-modern movement. But, at the same time, with its belief in the importance of saving lost souls, evangelicalism hasn’t been able to completely divorce itself from modern culture–and, in the latter half of the twentieth century, it began to increasingly try to employ or co-opt aspects of the modern world in its efforts to lure “seekers” and others to the faith. As Ellsworth explains, one of the principal attractions of the Orthodox Church for him is its solidity–and lack of interest in integrating modern life. “There is, in the Orthodox Church, an enormous conservatism,” he marvels. “There is not going to be a radical change in the worship life of the church next week.”

This is an appealing idea, particularly to younger Orthodox converts who view evangelicalism as corrupted by the generation born right after World War II. “Baby boomers had an overweening confidence that our creativity and spontaneity was fascinating and rich,” says Frederica Mathewes-Greene, a one-time charismatic Episcopalian who’s now a prominent Orthodox speaker and author. “The following generation sees it as not all that rich. They find the decades of the rock band onstage performing songs kind of shallow. They’re looking past their parents for something earlier.”- From the 8-27-07 issue of the New Republic

The History of Pues (Pews)

It is hard to find anything on the history of pews in the Church. The late Anglican theologian John Mason Neale has a good and interesting history of pews at Project Canterbury. Neale wanted the Church of England to do away with pews.