Sally Thomas on Hallowmas

While I am not Catholic and do not revere the saints of past ages or pray for the dead as Roman Catholics do, Sally Thomas's reflections at First Things on the three day pageant of Halloween, All Saint's Day, and All Souls resonate with me very much as a story teller and a story receiver. Donald Miller writes of the stories that we write with our lives, and those are shaped by the stories that we listen to, and read, and tell--and re-enact. N.D. Wilson writes of the necessity of darkness in our stories and artwork, as well as light. And while I don't think that God needed us--or wanted us--to sin in order to tell his story, the fact remains that we DID sin. The world in which we live has darkness and sin and death and shadow. It is what we know and understand and in order to tell ourselves the story of redemption--of rescue from the darkness--one must necessarily start with the darkness. Maybe Halloween, from a Christian point of view, isn't such a bad place to do that.