When Saint Paul visited Athens and saw the abundance of statues of the gods they worshipped, he observed: “I see you Athenians are very religious.” If Paul were to visit the United States in the month of October, he would no doubt say, “I see you Americans are very superstitious,” referring to the skeletons, ghosts, vampires, giant arachnids, and dishes of blood that decorate our streets and homes in the weeks before Halloween. When the day itself arrives, the cry of “trick or treat” echoes the need to appease the undead in order to keep them away from us. As a pinch of incense before the marble Zeus, so is the Mars bar tossed into the vampire’s bag.

“Halloween” is the eve of “Hallow Day,” or the day of All Hallows; “een” is a contraction minus the apostrophe: “e’en,” for “even,” for “evening.”  “Hallow” is a rare and strange old word still in common use, having had the good fortune of being found in the Lord’s Prayer. Untold millions of English-speaking people know the line and utter it from memory: “Hallowed be thy Name.” Something is hallowed when it is set apart, respected, or honored; and to set something apart is to acknowledge its sanctity or holiness. God’s Name is holy, itself worthy of being revered, a sanctified word. Sanctified people can also be thought of as hallowed, and this takes us to the day of All Hallows—the day after Halloween, known as All Saints’ Day.

Zagreb cemetery Mirogoj on All Saints Day visited by thousands of people light candles for their deceased family members.

The superstition on wide display at Halloween need not bother us, though I am appreciative of the point that evil forces somehow exist and it is dangerous to entertain them. (See the novels of Charles Williams, who was an important influence on C. S. Lewis; one of them is called All Hallows’ Eve.) On the level of the Mars bar, Halloween’s major threat is culinary bad taste. Still the holiday does remind us of death.

All Saints’ Day and the day after it, commonly called All Souls’ Day, remind us in a healthy way that there is another life that follows this one. That life is not one of spectral lingering, not a life spent in the shadows. Rather, it is life lived more fully, life in the presence of God, indeed life that is moving deeper into the being of God. This was a great comfort to me when my wife died. The following Sunday I was walking to church—it was late Advent in New York City; dawn’s early light tinting the sky—when it suddenly came to me that she and I were on divergent paths. My life was continuing here on earth, an ongoing pilgrimage. Hers was now on the other side of death. And while I could know nothing of the details of that path, I knew that Jesus was taking care of her.

Several months later I received a letter from a young friend. He had been in college with our children and had met Susan and me on one of our visits. In his letter he spoke of having married after college and how he and his wife had lost their first child in a miscarriage. He spoke of this child by name. Knowing my wife’s love of children, he wanted to tell me something he had either imagined or dreamed: that when Susan arrived on the other side of death, their child had met her and, hand in hand, he was showing her around.

Of course, a divine gift of a picture like this is not “evidence” of “what heaven is really like”; none of us can know such details. But that heaven is a place of meeting is assuredly true—that the people who meet are hallowed souls will also be true—and that at the heart of our being, our chronological age is irrelevant. The little miscarried child had never breathed air on this earth. Yet he could meet Susan and take her hand and guide her.

Those of us who bemoan the deaths each year of millions of unborn children all over the world, may find some solace in the thought that those children are not lost forever. Indeed, when our time comes, one of them may take our hand to show us the heavenly sights, sights that will be glorious beyond our imagining.

— The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin, theologian-in-residence for the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas, is the author of a handful of books, including Christian Ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed.