My desk-calendar on October 31 has neither of the above layers. It has only the third layer, “Reformation-Reconciliation Day.” On 31 October 1517, the University of Wittenberg’s Professor Martin Luther posted 95 debate theses, and the major Reformation was off and running. (When Lutherans and Catholics came to a common understanding on the doctrine of justification, this agreement was celebrated by adding “Reconciliation” to the day’s name.)

Desk-calendars should have historical depth. The American political philosopher and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr modeled for us the importance of the long view in making decisions. I hope my next desk-calendar will read, in three layers on October 31, “Reformation-Reconciliation Day,” “Halloween,” “Samhain.”

Now, as stratigraphers examine geological strata, religion analysts ask themselves about the beliefs in the October 31 – November 1 festival. Let’s look at these beliefs:

1.....As the “wall of separation” between church and state has a wide door in it, so the wall between life and death. A 2007 pre-Halloween AP/Ipsos poll found that 34% of Americans believe in ghosts, 23% have “seen or believed” themselves to have been “in the presence of a ghost,” and 30% have awakened with the “sense of a strange presence in the room.” Samhain and Halloween dramatize this human experience by having the dead walk through that wide door only one night each year—the night on which they visit their old haunts, some up to no good and others expecting hospitality.

2.....A second belief is that the ordinary-natural can be invaded by the extraordinary-supernatural. If the dead cannot be trusted to stay dead, the ordinary-natural cannot be believed to be the whole of reality.

3.....If the door between life and death opens and the dead can walk through it to the living, the dead are not absolutely dead, and the life/death distinction is not absolute: on both sides of the wide door, there is life. The founding event in Christianity is that Jesus made a three-day round-trip from this side to that, then back to this side. We Christians celebrate that trip every Sunday as the week’s resurrection day, but especially on one day of the year, which we call Easter.

4.....Also through that wide door, bodiless consciousnesses (“spirits”)—good (angels) and bad (demons)--can get to us, and we can have dealings with them. When Luther was translating the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into German, the devil appeared in order to tempt him to abandon the project, and Luther threw his inkwell at him.

5.....Conversation occurs between the residents on either side of the wide door. Speeches from this side are called “prayer,” speeches from the other side are called “revelation” and "inspiration." (Materialists-atheists say that if you talk to God, it’s prayer: if God talks to you, you’re insane.)

6.....The struggle between good and evil is cosmic-supernatural-transcendent, not just natural (inside and between human beings). The Christian autumn festival dramatizes this warfare by assigning the evil to the evening (so, “Hallow-EEN") before the good makes its appearance (after morning-resurrection!) as All Saints Day, which remembers especially the Christian martyrs.

7.....The consummate meaning of All Saints Day is that it is the one day in the Christian Year when the wall between life and death is down and the whole Church worships together, the Church Triumphant (so-called dead Christians) and the Church Militant (Christians still struggling on earth for good against evil). (“Saints” means simply all Christian believers, though some churches use the word also to honor certain Christians as exemplary for the rest of us.)

Finally, a curiosum. The Christian autumn festival—Halloween + All Saints Day—reflects the long-ago cultic competition between Druidism and Christianity. It assigns Druidism to the evil evening, so children dress up as just-for-fun terrorists (witches, masks, skeletons, ghosts, bats) and threaten evil-pranks. Modern-day (Neo-)Pagans object to this as disrespect for their ancestor-religion. But we Christians respond that we must make public the distinction between paganism’s nature-worship and the worship of the Creator of nature (as in the New Testament’s Romans 1).

The curiosum is that the general public celebrates only the evil evening of the two-day Christian festival! But HallowEEN serves a general-public function. Everybody likes to get a little scared, and Alfred Hitchcock made a good thing of it for himself. Also, it feels good—in this world of perpetual terrorist threat—to confine scary evil to one night a year.