JOHN DEMPSTER: Universe wasn’t started by a now-absent mechanic
On Monday evening, the pavements will be busy with excited children dressed in scary costumes, defying the darkness with torches and flickering candles in hollowed-out pumpkins. They’ll knock on front doors and say: “Trick or treat?!”
Halloween (or All Hallows’ Eve) is the subject of old stories about ghosts and spirits walking, skeletons dancing in macabre graveyards, the veil between this world and the next at its most transparent. And even “Trick or treat” can in the lips of some represent darkness rather than light – a cruel doorstep blackmail.
We are no strangers to darkness in these difficult years of Covid and war, rising inflation and fuel costs, social inequality. Some of us are burdened by anxiety and despair. We fear the darkness will overwhelm us, the light of our hope proves too frail to defy the night. And what of those dark spiritual forces many Christians believe can oppress us?
The scary night of All Hallows’ Eve is followed in the church calendar by All Saints’ Day on November 1 when many Christians remember those now in heaven, who in life chose to be God’s friends, seeking light rather than darkness, and were not disappointed by their choice.
They are all there in this unseen dimension, more themselves than ever they were, all the good they did remembered and rewarded, all their sins wiped from the divine memory in a glorious act of selective amnesia.
This juxtaposition of Halloween and All Saints’ Day highlights that for now our universe is divided – light and darkness, matter and spirit, right and wrong, this world and the next, God and the forces of evil. But it will not always be like this.
God has not given up on the universe. It’s not a machine built and set in motion by a now-absent mechanic. The universe and everything in it – including all the darkness and pain – is a living thing, dependent on God, sustained by God’s breath.
Christians believe that when Jesus died, light and darkness met, and darkness was overcome. And so we have this amazing vision that in the end, the whole of creation will be united. There will be no division, no inner struggle between right and wrong, no ‘them and us’, no evil, no darkness. Only light and love.
Halloween and All Saints’ Day encourage us to say “yes!” to God, “yes” to the light. And as we walk the pavements of life gladly with torches and candles of hope, we share not a mere treat, but the great news of the coming of the Light.
And we share it as we go through life not with our words and actions only, for something of that Light is seen in us.
