SPIRITUAL CONFUSION
Pushing my wife Claire’s shopping around our local Sainsbury’s supermarket in the East of England a few weeks before Christmas, there it was: a Shrek 2 Advent Calendar. What, I wondered, had Shrek and Advent ever had to do with one another? It seemed to sum up just how far things had changed since the 1950s when, growing up in a Christian family, I’d first become aware of Advent calendars. At that time they’d helped tell the story of Christ’s coming into the world. That was what they were for, I’d always thought. Apparently not. But my wife did remind me about what Jesus arriving on earth and Shrek have in common: a donkey …
As I wrote this (November 2004), the American presidential election was taking place across the Atlantic. Seeking re-election was George W Bush, born-again Southern Baptist, who wanted a Christian America. Traditional Christian values were basic to his platform, and he saw no divide between religion and politics. Well, his religion and his politics, anyway. The main thing he was standing against was another – rather different – version of holding religion and politics together: the Islamist one. Seeking to deprive Bush of a second term was Senator John Kerry of Boston, a liberal Roman Catholic. Kerry seemed to stand for a lot of things the Catholic Church opposes, such as abortion and gay marriage. His understanding of life is a secular one, where religion is for a person’s private life, and politics belongs to the public sphere. The way the battle between them – like that between Bush and Al Gore four years previously – divided America down the middle was instructive. Europe and the rest of the West gave up on quite this kind of contest a while back.
Travel certainly helps broaden one’s perspective. My wife and I were in France in early October that year for a belated summer holiday. The way Halloween was being promoted there was intriguing: mainly, though not exclusively, in the bakery-confectionery shops. Very different from England, where almost every store presents a Halloween face at this time of year. But, on our return from France, almost immediately we were off on a work trip to New England. Modern Halloween is largely an American invention. It’s hard even for folk from a place like England to come to terms with how pervasive this festival is in the United States: it’s everywhere. Halloween, of course, is only the re-emergence of the pagan Celtic festival of Samhain, ‘Summer’s End’, and their New Year. The following is some of what practising witch Doreen Valiente has to say about Halloween / Samhain in her book An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present: