Halloween in Park Slope, the Brooklyn neighborhood, is quite an event. Our daughter, Mary, and her husband Peter, live a few blocks away from Park Slope, where Peter’s parents live. So, it was easy for Lori and I to experience a little of it last year when we arrived for our grandson Lionel’s birth.
Lori and I strolled down the streets, fascinated by the historic brownstones, their stoops crowded with glowing jack-o’-lanterns and cornstalks, cobwebs stretched across wrought-iron railings, plastic skeletons lounging on window ledges, and paper ghosts drifting from parlor-floor windows. They even had a Halloween parade Saturday night.
We’re going back and bringing our 9-year-old granddaughter, Emerysyn, with us to celebrate Lionel’s first birthday. But exploring Park Slope at Halloween should be a bonus. We plan to stroll down the streets, and Lori and I will have as much fun watching Lionel and Emmie in their costumes as we will with the Halloween decorations.
Halloween is short for All Hallows’ Eve, the night before All Saints’ Day, though for most us, whether in Brooklyn or back home in Kentucky, that connection has been buried under the candy and costumes. For Protestants, October 31 carries another meaning: it is the date in 1517 when, according to tradition, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany.
Luther did not pick the date at random. He knew that the next day, November 1, All Saints’ Day, the Castle Church would hold a major festival, displaying its vast collection of holy relics. Thousands of pilgrims and townspeople would fill the streets and pass the church doors. Luther wanted an academic debate about the sale of indulgences —certificates sold by the church to reduce a soul’s time in purgatory. Posting a notice on the church door was the 16th-century equivalent of pinning a flyer to a community bulletin board, and by posting it on All Hallows’ Eve, Luther ensured maximum visibility.
The connection between the two is complicated, and I don’t want to oversell it. Luther didn’t invent Halloween, and Halloween didn’t cause the Reformation. Luther simply used a date already on the calendar, and it has carried two meanings ever since.
Even so, the two stories share an odd kinship, and it’s about death. Walk down any block in Park Slope, and you’ll see skeletons, tombstones, and ghosts. We have turned the fear of death into a costume party.
Medieval Christians took death far more seriously. Poor villagers went door to door on All Hallows’ Eve, offering prayers for the dead in exchange for small “soul cakes.” Behind that custom was the belief that the dead might be lingering in purgatory and that the living could shorten their stay. It’s not hard to see a distant ancestor of trick-or-treating there, though historians still argue about how direct the line is.
Luther was in part reacting to that anxiety about death. By 1517, the church was selling indulgences, and a popular Dominican friar was selling indulgences for the Church with a clever slogan that promised a soul would spring from purgatory every time a coin the coffer would ring. Fear of death had become a business.
Luther, a pastor who had wrestled with his own fear of judgment, said something simple and radical: you cannot buy your way into God’s favor, and you don’t have to. Grace is a gift. “The righteous shall live by faith,” he read in Paul’s letter to the Romans, and it changed his life and eventually the world.
Maybe that’s the best way to see these two October 31sts together. Halloween laughs at death because we’re a little afraid of it. The Reformation reminds us why we need not be afraid. The writer of Hebrews says Christ came to free “those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.”
I’m sure I will ponder that on Saturday as we celebrate Lionel’s first birthday. He did nothing to earn the party, the cake, or the circle of people who adore him. He will simply receive it, which in itself is a picture of grace.
So yes, go to the parade. Carve the pumpkin, wear the costume, and enjoy the fun. But let Reformation Day hover quietly in the background, like a candle in a brownstone window, reminding us that the gift we couldn’t buy has already been given.