by Rev. Shannon E. Sullivan
Because I am a pastor, a lot of people assume that Christmas or Easter would be my favorite holiday, but no– I love Halloween. I am obsessed, really. I count down to Halloween starting in July, and only that late because my countdown dice only have two digits. I search for costumes all year long and have enough to supply multiple bins that I leave out for the kids year-round. I am more interested in dressing up than I am in horror; our family is more into astronaut and superhero costumes than zombies or monsters.
To me, dressing up for Halloween captures something about faith that churches rarely recognize: the boundaries between sinners and saints can be blurred, porous even. We have a bit of sinner and saint in all of us, and Halloween is the thin place where we can explore possibilities beyond the scripts offered to us. However messy that may be.
Now, we don’t usually need to practice or play at being sinners. In late-stage capitalism, it seems most of what we do is tainted by sin, or at least by the sin of the billionaires we let control everything. But the Church has a long history of separating saints from sinners as though there is a binary, placing people on pedestals almost to give us the excuse to not live God’s love as they did. And, often, despite the witness of Scripture, we are told saints can’t be uppity women, or disabled, or queer folks, or whatever identities do not fit with a hegemonic normativity.
Halloween can be a break from that normativity, a chance to be weird and quirky and loud and “wrong,” even as we wonder how God is working through each of us to bring new life and goodness to our broken world.
This month’s Fidelia pieces blur the lines between sinners and saints. We review a manga called Saint Young Men, which presents Jesus and the Buddha living like twenty-somethings in modern Tokyo, blurring boundaries between antiquity and modernity, as well as religious and cultural traditions. We reflect on the summer’s Young Clergy Women Conference, fangirling the patron saint of YCWpreaching, the Rev. Debie Thomas.
As we approach Halloween on October 31 and All Saint’s Day November 1, what stories of saintly sinners or sinning saints are you telling? What stories are you living? What ones will you try on?
Rev. Shannon E. Sullivan
Content Editor (and formerly Managing Editor- they can’t get rid of me yet), Fidelia Magazine
Rev. Shannon E. Sullivan (she/her/hers) is a life-long feminist and United Methodist currently serving the community of Frederick, Maryland, as the senior pastor of Trinity UMC. She is a graduate of Drew Theological School in Madison, New Jersey. She is married to Aaron Harrington, her high school sweetheart, who is a pilot and all around aviation geek. They have two living children who they are raising in a house cluttered by books and airplane parts. Shannon is a proud former Managing Editor of Fidelia, and more of her writing can be found through Fidelia and at shannonesullivan.com.
