Thursday, October 14, 2010

halloween

I love Halloween - it's an excuse to dress up and indulge in a bit of a party without the endless palaver of Christmas or the emotional blackmail of a birthday.
I also love it because it's a festival invented by kids, for kids. The idea of ghosts and ghouls and witches and green-slime and calling at the doors of complete strangers looking for sweets is so compelling and thrilling for a child that they have, over the past few years, pestered us adults into turning it into a major event.
Halloween has, of course, got its roots in religion - All Souls Day. And now the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales have issued a statement saying that Halloween has lost it’s true meaning and that it shouldn’t be about ‘occult’ celebrations of witchdoctors and zombies and green-face paint and sweets that turn your tongue black, but that our kids should all be dressing up as saints and we should leave the neighbours alone and instead be celebrating this important holiday by taking them to mass.
On behalf of the children I would just like to say to the Bishops – get stuffed!
Firstly, All Souls was a complete non-entity of a religious celebration until the kids got hold of the whole sweets/skeleton/wrapping each other up in toilet paper to make-the-best-egyptian-mummy angle. They invented that and made something out of it. Not you!
Secondly, haven’t the English Bishops little enough to worry about when they can issue miserable, boring, pronouncements about people taking religious holidays more seriously – trying to banish the bit of cheap fun out of our lives in the middle of a joyless recession?
And thirdly - oh thirdly. Do you not think that the world’s children have suffered enough at your hands, Holy Fathers, without drawing attention to yourselves by passing judgement on how they should and shouldn’t be interpreting “your” religious holidays? Generations of being taught to cow-tow to Rome has not proven a particularly healthy route for our children to take after all, resulting largely in endemic abuse and untold misery.
The Irish Bishops have stayed quiet on the subject. They have enough on their plates - keeping their heads down on the subject of anything to do with anything, especially children.
This latest pronouncement, although it seems archaic and laughable, is not merely a sign of how utterly detached the Catholic Church remains from the working of the real world. It can be easily interpreted in the more literal sense; the institution of the church doesn’t like children very much. The Pope giving out about Harry Potter is one thing. Rome’s complete inability to grasp the dark personal horror of institutional abuse is another.
“They just don’t get it,” a priest friend of me tried to explain to me once. “You can argue and talk all you like,” he says, “the institution of Rome would sacrifice every child in the world to stop one gay marriage. It’s a different world. A brick wall.”
Newsflash – you might say - the Catholic Church doesn’t like women and children? Didn’t you read the memo? But as a mother who is bringing her child up as catholic – it is a constant source of horror to me just how much the old boys club that is running the institution which runs parallel to my chosen belief system (I try to live by basic, good, Christian values – they purport to represent me as God’s homophobic, morally violent Military Wing and there is seemingly not a damn thing I can do about it!) is utterly detached from my life as an ordinary Catholic mother.
My son will dress as an African Witch Doctor and go the Halloween party at his school, which is Catholic, and the local priest Father Paddy will be there drinking tea and having the craic with the kids and NOT standing outside the school gates with a banner saying “Down with witches!” My son’s lovely school, and my kind, intelligent priest, make it possible for me to enjoy the benefits of being a practising Catholic in 2010. Outside of the individual religious that I defer to in the day to day practise of my a la carte Catholicism, the liberalism and tolerance and humanity that contradicts the bizarre belief systems of their supposedly appointed elders, I’d have to leave and become an atheist, or a protestant or perish the thought – a new age dingly-dangly “Buddhist” type which, frankly, all seems like a lot of hard work. I already know the Rosary and most of the Saints – even though I don’t encourage my son to dress up as Matt Talbot and wear a barbed-wire cillus belt at Halloween, (although, now they come to mention it….I’m sure there’s a few martyrs the Halloween tradition could suitably mimic. Perhaps they should put in an Opus Dei flagellation stand in the €2 shop?)
While the rest of the world remains open-mouthed at the archaic, detached statements emanating from the fossils in charge of what is still our biggest, wealthiest religious institution, ordinary Catholics will continue to let their children dress up as witches and dunk for apples and trick-and-treat their neighbours, because nothing makes us feel more alive than being part of a community, and seeing our children bring creative and enjoy themselves. Some of us, including me, will go the mass and light candles for our dead as well. Surely God – if not His Bishops - is big enough to accommodate both.

2 comments:

  1. I love Halloween! It is one of my be favourite times of the year. I will be dressed in a witches outfit, serving sweets and gooey chews to all the lovely little monsters that knock on my door. We go all out and the house will decorated accordingly. I even have Halloween nails at the present!
    Thank you for popping over to my blog Serendipidy. I did enjoy Ellis Island and hope to read Recipes For a Perfect Marriage soon as I have that one too.

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  2. Thanks for stopping by and commenting on my book review, my husband is now reading the book too, and loving it just as much as I did.

    As for Halloween, it's all fun and games isn't it? Like you say, if we can't have a cheap bit of fun in the middle of a recession, then what can we have?

    Take care.

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