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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

A question for you on eve of All Saints’ Day

Donald Clegg

Sunday is Halloween, a “hallowed” day, which is to say holy or sacred – the eve of the Christian festival of All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1.

Which also happens to be my wife’s birthday, and since we’ll be flying to Mexico on Monday for a wedding, I’ll use their holiday: Dia de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead.

It’s a holiday of Aztec origin, practiced for about 3,000 years prior to the Spanish conquistadors’ attempt to wipe it out, as the festival was seen as a blasphemous display of irreverence, mocking death.

The Spaniards even changed its date, moving it to All Saints’ Day, to give it a more Christian flavor. It had formerly, according to the Aztec calendar, occurred roughly at the beginning of August.

Now, some 500 years later, it’s still thriving.

Dia de los Muertos honors the dead, inviting their souls to visit by offering food and drink, and telling tales of the departed, all in a spirit of familial festivity. That doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.

Better yet, it goes three days: Halloween through All Souls’ Day, Nov. 2.

But wait. All Saints’ and Souls’ are Catholic celebrations, which means … well, I guess they’re not for all Christians, are they?

And there’s Halloween itself, with its origins in the Celtic festival of Samhain, meaning “summer’s end.” Those Celts were pagans, though, weren’t they?

And isn’t Halloween considered a pagan holiday by some? And therefore a satanic celebration of the occult?

And to think I grew up believing it was all about the treats. Especially the houses that passed out candy bars, not those miserly little butterscotches.

So, keeping all these saints and souls and Snickers in mind, I’ve got a simple question that I bet you can’t answer. Or maybe you can, but there are so many other competing responses that they amount to none at all, as they drown each other out.

Here it is: What is religion?

I’ll just wait a minute while you go check your dictionary.

All righty then, that wasn’t much help, was it? Kind of an “anything goes” sort of deal. Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s old definition of pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

But people can’t seem to agree on just what it is that they see. I don’t see sex as the real smut, for example, next to, oh, people killing other people because they don’t believe in the right religion.

I don’t find anything appalling about Halloween (and never mind that Harry Potter!) or Saints’ and Souls’ and Dead’s days. Or my inability to choose which ones to condemn and which to sanctify.

Nor the apparent disrespect and levity with which I’m treating this subject, as what I find appalling is the effort to make a harmless day of play – dressing up in costumes and visiting neighbors’ houses for treats – into a satanic ritual.

It seems to me that one of the main goals and purposes of life is to find a way to turn obligation into privilege: the transformation of the mundane into the extraordinary. Work into play.

Mark Twain said that work is “what a body is obliged to do,” and Tom Sawyer tricked his friends into whitewashing the fence by doing just that, changing their belief about what they were doing.

It’s so terribly mundane that we’re obligated to die. It’s extraordinary that in our ability to celebrate those who are dead we can thumb our noses at it. Even play.

Whatever religion is, that, at least, is religious.

Donald Clegg, a longtime Spokane resident, is an author and professional watercolor artist. Contact him via e-mail at info@donaldclegg.com.