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Monthly Letter

Like a cloak, the host around us.

November 2024

As we leave October into November we pass through a strange festival of the church – a three day festival of what we call Halloween, (Hallow’s eve) All Saints day, (or All Hallows day) and finally All Souls Day. (A bit like Christmas eve, Christmas day and Boxing day). The three days that bridge the two months are called Allhallowtide or Allsaints tide. ‘Hallow’ meaning Holy is apparently synonymous with 'Saint’.

It’s ironic that the survival of this lovely old word ‘Hallow’ - which we use in the Lord’s prayer – has become associated with darkness, horror, and the macabre. I suspect that Christians are to blame for that because they didn’t recognise the holiness or the weight of the pagan rituals (Celtic in these isles) that they tried to reinterpret. Samain was celebrated at about this time of the year, bonfires lit to throw back the darkness, the dead remembered and welcomed. We are odd about what we say is Holy and what not.

It makes sense to me; those ancient traditions were aware that we need all that we have to face dark times and we draw upon the past, people who have inspired us, who have seen difficult times and won through, or just been remarkably good (like Mother Theresa). And of course the precious people we have loved and who have loved us.

In the church, at our All Soul’s service, we use fire also, we light little candles to remember our dead, to bring their light back into our hearts and somehow, through the ritual, express our thankfulness for them.

It feels like a special, very human festival, and that I love too, because my God is all about being human. I extend this season right through November – Saints and Martyrs – I wrap it around the remembrance of fallen soldiers, and look to their courage to hold us steady. I ponder the saints, the cloud of witnesses to what is good. I will visit the graves of my mother and grandmothers to remember again what they taught me.

Our world is rolling into and through a dark season. None of us can deny that. Overseas we have seen horror built on horror. We have uncovered in our own country appalling things in prisons, in rivers and on our streets. We have felt powerless before suffering and afraid of what is to come. But this is not a new experience on earth.

To remember those who have gone before, the ones we knew well and the ones whose stories inspire, is to draw on what was good in older wisdoms and help us think how we might ‘hallow’ the time given to us, how we might pattern our lives so that they might be lights, only small but together throwing back the darkness.

The Rev Kate Plant