Halloween and Queer Spirituality |
While mainstream religions tend to be hostile to queer people, Halloween can provide a sacred space for them.
The meaning of Halloween resonates deeply with queer people's experiences of living in the in-between.
Halloween can provide a space of belonging as it celebrates being an "outsider" and living on the edge.
Honouring queer lineage is a profound way to embrace queer sacredness.
Many religions attack queer people every day by calling us an abomination, a disease, or a sin. It is not a surprise that many queer people grow up to fear religions. For many, being queer means they have to leave their faith behind because it was a place of condemnation rather than comfort. It can create an empty spiritual space that is often hard to fill. However, for queer people who wish to have a spiritual life, our longing for meaning, ritual and connection rarely disappears.
For a growing number of queer people, Halloween, or Samhain (pronounced "sow-in") as many spiritual practitioners still call it, has become one of the places where they can find a spiritual home.
Samhain was, above all, a festival of thresholds. It represents the end of harvest into the winter, the in-between of light and dark, and the living and the dead. The ancient Gaels believed it as a time when the boundaries between the living and spiritual worlds grew thin.
Queer people know thresholds intimately. Many queer lives involve standing between categories of genders, between the closet and the open, between safety and danger, between freedom and........