What's the connection between Halloween and All Saints?
Halloween appears today in popular American culture as a very secular holiday with no particularly religious meaning. But in fact its origins are very religious, as the root meaning of Halloween (All Saints' eve) clearly shows.

The feast of All Saints is a time when Christians remember the countless holy men and women who have died and have been joined to the communion of saints in heaven. That remembrance of the dead--and of our union with them in the "communion of saints"—is the origin of Halloween's "secular" celebration, in which the dead seem to walk among us. The costumes worn by revelers were originally ways that people dressed up in the guise of the dead—as a way of visually reminding us of their continuing presence to us. Since the Church celebrates its important liturgical feasts with a vigil that begins at sundown, the night before All Saints' Day was the time when such dramatic costumes were donned. People acted out our belief that those who have gone before us to eternal life are still "connected" to us in a real way. But the reassuring message of All Saints' Day has been transformed in the secular version of the feast by an emphasis on ghoulish portrayals of the dead and by ghosts that are meant to frighten, not reassure. How much better it would be if children could celebrate Halloween by dressing up in costumes that evoke the memory of various saints and other heroes of the Christian faith with whom we are still in a "communion" of love!

What happens to people when they die?
What we call death looks like the complete and final end of a person's existence. But our faith tells us that appearances can mislead us. We believe in faith that death is the separation of a person's body and soul. Further, we believe that our soul, which is immortal, continues to live on after our physical death. Just exactly what the existence of a soul after death is like, or what the experience of death itself is like, is something that we don't know for certain. But our faith does teach us that after death we continue to maintain our personal identity and that we go either in the direction of God (heaven) or away from God (hell). The Bible is clear that on the Last Day there will remain only heaven and hell, and the earth will be no more. For those who go towards God (heaven), we believe that before entering God's presence in heaven, one must be purified of any and all remaining imperfections. That experience of being purified of imperfections that still remain in us at death is what the Church calls Purgatory. We know very little about Purgatory, but it is safe to say that the popular illustrations of Purgatory as place of torment are probably not very helpful in understanding what it is like to be purified and made holy and perfect, ready to see God face-to-face. Those who die already filled with perfect love for God enter immediately into the happiness of heaven, while those who die with hearts turned completely away from and closed to God spend an eternity in that posture--i.e., without God--which they have chosen. That experience is what we mean when we refer to hell.

What's heaven really like?
There is no picture in the world that can show us what heaven is really like, since the whole point of heaven is that it is "out of this world." Yet, the Bible does give us a hint of what the essence of heaven is like. In the First Epistle of John (4:8) we are told that "God is love," and we know that heaven by definition is a condition or state of being with God forever. To understand a little bit about what heaven is really like, we need to think and imagine what it would be like to be perfectly loved, by the perfect Lover, forever. We need to remember our most secure, warm, wonderful memories of being loved, and to multiply them by a billion times. We need to imagine being totally, unconditionally, loved in a way that makes us happier than we have ever been or ever dreamed of being. Then we add to that the knowledge that we will share heaven with others--all of the people who ever lived who love God--and we realize that part of heaven will be the joy of being part of a community of people who are together and in perfect harmony--like the best and happiest family gathering there could ever be. Finally, since we know that at the end of time we will have a resurrected body like that of Jesus, we can imagine that in heaven there will be a "spiritual body" that is ours, a body that knows neither pain nor aging nor anything else that would cause us to be less than perfectly happy. This is probably the hardest part of all to imagine--a body unlike any body we know of now, yet our very own body that continues to make us the unique persons we have become during our lives on earth. It is in that resurrected body that we will know God forever and be perfectly filled with love and perfectly happy for all eternity. That's what heaven is "really" like!

Will we see our family and friends when we get to heaven?
One of the most ancient traditions of the Church is what we call the communion of saints—the belief that beyond death there exists a deep union in love among all those who have died in Christ. Artists from the very beginning, in trying to imagine what heaven is like, have shown scenes in which all of God's holy ones are together. Even in the New Testament, in the Book of Revelation, the author imagines heaven as a place where all those who have remained faithful to Christ will be gathered around God's throne. Thus, although we do not know exactly how it will work, we can with confidence reassure our children that in heaven we will be reunited with those whom we love on earth.