What do faith and work have to do with #Halloween ?

Last updated on: October 31, 2015 at 8:50 am by Jennifer Woodruff Tait

What do faith and work have to do with #Halloween ? 2015-10-30T12:02:06-05:00 Jennifer Woodruff Tait

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That question was answered for me profoundly by an interview that appeared on our channel last year over at The High Calling called “Serving God in the business of death.” Funeral director Caleb Wilde, who blogs at Confessions of a Funeral Director, had some penetrating things to say to Christine Scheller about his occupation, and all of our mortality:

Christine A. Scheller: You take death seriously, but also include a lot of humor in your writing about it. Why do you think our culture is so generally death avoidant, but embracing of the macabre at Halloween?

Caleb Wilde: We are in an obsessive state of denial about death and work really hard to make sure it stays a comfortable distance from us. And so, it’s possible that Halloween connects to a number of things that we obsessively attempt to push to the side. It’s a holiday that lets us embrace some degree of spirituality and some degree of death acceptance.

Like a valve for a topic that it’s not OK to talk about?

Yes, but we’re still controlling the conversation to a degree during Halloween. Most of it is what I would call death porn, where it’s not a realistic picture of the experience of death and dying. It’s a stylized picture. It captures something that is only a mirror of what’s real.

There are dangers to this, and Wilde outlines them powerfully. He also comments on all of our need to learn to live with silence and doubt:

Right now, I’m at a place where I’m comfortable in silence. I have drawn a lot from Holy Saturday, which is the day between Christ’s death and resurrection when the disciples mourned his death without knowledge of the resurrection. Death is that Holy Saturday experience where there aren’t many words to be said and sometimes speaking words to silence is more harmful than helpful.I used to have a pretty detailed theodicy that I believed about God in order to continue to justify my religion in the face of pain and in the face of the tragedy that I saw. But now, what I tell people is that I’m comfortable in the silence. I’m comfortable in the doubt. We don’t always need to speak words to some situations and death is one of those situations.

You owe it to yourself to read the whole interview.

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