Twenty years ago this week, about eight hundred college students in a small town in Southeast Asia celebrated Halloween for the first time, and I was there with them, wearing cat ears and painted on whiskers, even though at that point in my life I wasn’t entirely sure if it was “Christian” to celebrate Halloween. (I’m top middle in this photo, and yes, I’ve run these photos through a filter because the faces aren’t mine to make public.)
Last night we had almost two hundred people at church celebrating All Saints Day. Children paraded in their Halloween costumes, and then performed “Bright Morning Stars”; teenagers shared about saints from history; and then we lit candles and went to the memorial garden, where we prayed the phos hilaron and read the names of all interred there, including both grandparents and children of those present. Cleaning up afterward, I walked through the apparently empty nave and felt the presence of the saints there; I asked them to pray for us.
When I had a chance to welcome the crowd at the beginning of the evening, I said that Rosie’s teacher had told her class this week that Halloween was a holiday with pagan origins, but that she wrong: while most of our holidays have some entangled origins, Halloween might be the most historically Christian of all. For a thousand years, Christians have been celebrating All Hallow’s Eve as the night before All Saints Day.
This was a night to remember those saints who had died, and in remembering, to proclaim our belief that even though they’re dead, they’re not gone. They are with God, awaiting the last day when all things will be made new and they will be given new bodies. It was a night to remember that while death is our enemy, we don’t have to fear it, because we already know who wins. Jesus defeated death.
In the Episcopal church, this is really a three day celebration. We have Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls. All Saints is a day especially for remembering the dead who are, I said last night, “sort of famous for their holiness” – and All Souls is a day for our family members and friends who have recently died.
Over the last six months or so, I’ve been remembering some ghosts, ghosts of my own self, people whose lives touched mine decades ago, and of course those characters from history who shaped me without even knowing it. I’ve been reliving this book, my first book, a memoir about two years I spent in Southeast Asia right after college, as we prepared its second edition for publication (I wrote about choosing not to make major revisions, and a little about the process of recording an audiobook, and about rethinking the language of short-term missions in an Episcopal context).
And now, somewhat perfectly placed in this little All Saints triduum, it’s here.
You can find it online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org. If you backed the Kickstarter, you should have received the ebook and paperbacks have shipped. And if you’re waiting for the audiobook, it’s in production and will be available soon.
If you'd like to support the release, that would be amazing. You can:
Share the news on social
Request the book at your local library
Suggest the memoir for your book club or small group
Here’s the playlist that goes with the book, and a brief interview I did with the editors.
Gratefully!
Such great news, Amy! Thrilled for you and excited to read it.
Got my copy! 😊