Northwoods Seelsorger

 Again, I'm carrying over another post from a discussion board where I post in order to kind of 'archive' some of my thoughts..... Interesting what ends up in a local paper.  I wrote my weekly article (clergy in the area take turns) on "Waiting eagerly for that day," ending with the words: "He is coming to take us home." It was a contrast with the predicted "long, dark winter" of sin and death and our longing for the glorious return of our Lord and the eternal joy that awaits the believer.  On the facing page was an article entitled "Witches mark Halloween with reflections on death as well as magic," by someone from Brandeis University. The author notes that Halloween is "marked as a sacred day known as Samhain in which death is celebrated," a day celebrated by "contemporary pagans." The author writes that Samhain, "one of the eight major Wiccan holidays," or what are referred to as sabbats, is...

 I recently posted the following on a discussion board online, but am posting it here as well for future reference:  In a few days Halloween will be here, the national holiday where folks in my part of the country love to decorate their houses in ways equaled only by Christmas, and have virtually caused a condition of 'orange fatigue.'  I can thank my Celtic forebears for making an otherwise religious occasion into one that obscures anything of the hope of heaven.  I was surprised, however, that the triduum of this festival (All Hallow's Eve, All Hallow's Day, All Soul's Day) is not cut all of one cloth, and not all of the triduum of this festival is necessarily one of joy.  All Hallow's Eve, at least going back to medieval times, treated this part of the triduum as a more somber time.  In a missal from 1927 I noticed that the Catholic church designated purple for the altar and priestly vestments.  In James Monti's book A Sense of the Sacred...