When the Haunted House Leads to Holy Ground

My adopted hometown of Pittsburgh has given the world many gifts—among them Mr Rogers, Billy Porter,  and Andy Warhol. In a very different vein, we also gave the world the zombie movie. The University of Pittsburgh is home to the first academic “horror studies” center, part of the enduring legacy of George Romero’s Pennsylvania-based Night of the Living Dead. Mr. Rogers, in his own way, is the start of it all–Romero began his film career with Pittsburgh public media. This is what life is like: gentleness and terror can be seeded in the same gardens.

I am not a horror fan myself. Nevertheless, for the past several years, my family has made our annual pilgrimage to “Haunted Hollow,” where we visit the haunted corn maze, haunted house, haunted wagon ride, and haunted coal mine runoff bog (we are, after all, in Western PA). Halloween shrieks are not my favorite thing. And, also, I get it. I understand the desire to play out our worst fears and triumph over them. The desire to practice our screams and to slip out into the bright lights and music of the ticket booth and concession stand at the end, no substantially worse for wear.  Even as my nerves jangled on the way home, I had to admit that I had been smiling as creepy clowns jumped out at me in the dark. When we walked through full darkness as the inflatable fun house walls literally pressed in on us, my hands clutched my 18-year-old son in front of me as if his shoulders were the last life preserver on the boat.  

That’s the strange grace of Halloween—it speaks to a deeply human longing that there is more to life than meets the eye. As a secular culture, we go at it pretty unskillfully, but I am convinced the impulse is a holy one. Whether through ghosts, superheroes, or the hope of messages from beyond, we’re reaching for transcendence—something deeper than what consumerism or routine can offer. Of course, we don’t want to be limited by our own ho-hum lives of regular jobs and regular problems.

The power of All Saints Day, to which we wake after Halloween’s revelry, is assurance that nothing can separate us from the love of God or the love of one another. We are part of a communion of saints stretching back through time— better news by far than Batman’s capacity to save Gotham City. The true horrors of the world are not equally distributed; my own home is far from the ICE-ravaged apartments of Chicago, where fear truly terrorizes in the night. Halloween is an invitation to face our fears; All Saints Day is a summons to answer the call to serve the people God loves. 

The building of the congregation I serve is nestled in the heart of an urban neighborhood. We open the church doors for trick or treating, and hundreds of people will come by–people who may have wondered about the big church on the corner but who have never stepped inside. We decorate the sanctuary with lights and shadows, and our organist plays delightfully creepy music, as our neighbors peek in, candy in hand. The brave ones venture all the way inside. And who knows? Maybe, between the laughter and the pipe organ’s eerie notes, they’ll sense something truly transcendent—the communion of saints alive and well, right here among us.