How we'll celebrate Samhain (Halloween)

This will start my general post with the Pagan New Year, Samhain or what we call here Halloween. I love ritual and I'll write more about what I think the importance of it is, but for now, let's just jump in and do one.

It helps that my church (Unitarian Universalist) is accepting of all pathways including nature-based or neo-pagan practices. While my personal brand isn't one of the top recognized religions in the world, I think the important part is to find meaning in what goes on around us, not to get someone else to tell us what to think. So I'll use this ritual in church on Sunday morning (wonderful that Halloween happens to fall on a Sunday) and invite you to adapt it to your own halloween celebration.

We'll gather in a circle. Thankfully the church has moveable chairs and not pews. I'll have an altar set up on the north edge of the circle containing seasonal decorations (pumpkins, cornstalks, wheat, etc.), a Goddess vase containing dried flowers, and three candles representing the phases of the goddess (maiden, matron, crone). There will also be whole grain wheat bread, Apples, cider, and honey. When we are ready to begin the ritual, I'll use a pretty standard invocation of the four corners of the world and the powers of air, fire, water, and earth. If you need help with this invocation, try looking in Starhawk's The Spiral Dance or A Book of Pagan Rituals edited by Herman Slater. I'll post some thoughts about casting circles and ritual space more in detail at another time.

There are two aspects of the Samhain ritual that I'm going to emphasize. The first is the second harvest. In fact in our church we refer to this as the harvest festival. The second is the feast of the dead which is our opportunity to face our fears. (That's why all the scary costumes at Halloween.) I'm blending the two together.

When we think of the harvest festivals, commonly celebrated in the US at Thanksgiving, we think of having a big feast to celebrate the abundance that we have. But I sometimes wonder if our celebration of abundance doesn't cross over into a celebration of gluttony. Just yesterday the newspaper reported that a study showed a gain of 25 pounds in average weight for adult Americans in the past 40 years. And with children at age 12 having gained 11 pounds over their counterparts when I was a kid, the future seems to hold even larger, and I may say fatter, adults than today. But still, hunger is a problem in America. I quote from an article by Trudy Lieberman in The Nation:

"While the most severe forms of malnutrition and starvation that prevailed through the 1960s have largely disappeared, some 33 million people live in households that aren't sure where their next meals are coming from--those whom policy analysts call the food insecure. And with poverty on the rise--the United States experienced the biggest jump in poverty in a decade in 2001, to nearly 12 percent of the population--their ranks are growing. At the end of 2002 the US Conference of Mayors reported a 19 percent increase in the demand for emergency food over the previous year. Food pantries, shelters, soup kitchens and other emergency food providers now serve at least 23 million people a year. "They are America's dirty little secret," says Larry Brown, who directs Brandeis University's Center on Hunger and Poverty. "They are hardworking have-nots who cannot pay the rent, medical bills, and still feed their families.""

Lieberman

It seems incongruent that in that same nation, there are so many kids that are obese. According to an Associated Press article by Iraq Dreyfuss reported in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

"According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, America is facing an unprecedented epidemic of childhood obesity. And with the weight comes a greater chance of contracting diabetes as well as risk factors for heart disease."

Dreyfuss

Some sources have estimated this to be between 16 and 33 percent of children and adolescents in America. It may come as a surprise to you to find that a measurable percent of those children fall in the group of "food insecure" as well.

I am not proposing grandiose solutions to either problem, but I am asking you to think about how we celebrate the abundance of harvest this year. Will we sit down to a table laden with so much food that we cannot possibly eat all of it no matter how hard we try? Will we rise from that table groaning from the discomfort of a distended stomach and able to nothing more energetic than watch a Sunday afternoon football game? Will we scrape entire meals into our garbage containers because we don't even have the energy to package the leftovers and put them into the refridgerator for another day? Will we celebrate abundance or gluttony?

So, I am suggesting that as part of this second harvest festival, marked by a glut of candy that will come in from our children on Halloween eve or by the leftover goodies that we fail to hand out at the door, that we take some portion of our abundance and march it straight to the local food shelf, to a community meals program, or even to neighbors that you find are unable for one reason or another to prepare a healthful meal for themselves. We know abundance only in what we are able to give, not in what we are able to consume.

Now, sitting in this circle, let us turn to the ritual for recognizing our fears. I will hand out four balls of yarn, one to each cardinal point of the compas, and ask the person holding the yarn to wrap a portion around their wrists, and to give voice to what they fear. Let those who are near enough to hear that voice pick up a chant echoing the fear with the words "....binds you." So, one person may say "sickness," and those around will chant "sickness binds you." We'll have a drum section that will pick up the rhythm gently building as the ritual progresses. When a person has wrapped the yarn around their wrist and has called out their fear, they will toss the ball across the circle to someone on the other side who will repeat the ritual fear, calling out what they fear and letting those around them respond with "fear binds you." They will wrap the yarn around their own wrist and toss the ball across the circle to someone else.

When everyone has been bound into the circle with the yarn, we will see that we have all been caught in a giant spiderweb of fear. We will repeat over again what binds us. And then the drum will cease as we meditate on what we are afraid of, seeking a means of being liberated from our fears. I'll say:

"May this fear pass from me and mine!
May it pass, May it pass,
May it pass on the outflowing tide
And burn with the red sun
As the year dies
And fade
As everything fades,
As everything passes,
All fades away." (Starhawk)

At the end of the meditation, I'll ask: "What do you need to be free?"

As people call out what they need (health, hope, understanding, peace, etc.) I'll start walking through the web with a pair of scissors cutting the yarn apart and freeing people from their bonds of fear.

When all are freed of their bonds (and knowing this group, some dancing may occur), then we'll bring the drumming to a stillness and sit again. I'll go to the altar and make an invitation.

"Let all who may and who will come to the table. Partake of the produce of harvest, the symbol of our abundance: bread, honey, and cider. But come not only to receive, but to share of your abundance with gifts for our food shelf."

People will come to the table and have a piece of bread dipped in honey and a small glass of cider, and they will bring non-perishable food items for the box that we'll have for the foodshelf.

Finally, we'll break the circle and chat, socialize and then head for home to face the hordes of trick or treaters that will be coming later in the afternoon.

If you read this and find it useful, please join in the celebration. If you check some of my references, you'll find that I borrow liberally from different seasonal festivals to add meaning to the one that I'm celebrating at the time. I encourage you to do the same. Remember, the purpose is not to recite a phrase and breath a sigh of relief that it is over, but to find meaning through ritual. In future posts, I'll talk more about how to create rituals that make common events more meaningful. I hope you enjoy them.