Dear Beloved Passing the Peace Readers, 

I’m sure it is such a delight for people celebrating Halloween to have a Friday for trick-or-treating, costumes, and partying. My four year old niece proudly decided this year she wanted to be a bathtub and I cannot get over how incredibly her quirky independent spirit shines through in her costume - it’s so cute! I hope everyone has a fun and safe time celebrating. 

All Hallow’s Eve, the night before All Saint’s Day, is known by most of us today as Halloween but its origins lie within Celtic spiritual traditions that marked the end of the harvest and the starting of winter. This was seen as a sacred time to honour “thin places” where we can recognize the ways life, death, and the divine are all interconnected. 

You can read more about the concept of 'thin places' here or about the history of Halloween here. 

All Hallow's Day, or All Saint's Day is more commonly practiced within Catholicism or cultures heavily influences by Catholicism but I believe the spirit of this day can be celebrated by all. 

We are blessed indeed to be surrounded by a cloud of witnesses that accompany our journeys in faith. This includes our ancestors, as well as family and friends who are no longer with us on earth but very much with us in spirit. 

On November 16th, I would like to invite the community to honour the saints in our community: to remember loved ones whose stories we would like to share in community, to light candles and offer prayers of gratitude and remembrance. Funerals and celebrations of life are important times for grieving but this does not mean that as a community we can’t create similar spaces to mourn and celebrate together. I hope you will bring a story, or a picture, or other forms of tribute to the service. 

For tomorrow, I leave with you the following blessing by Kate Bowler:

a blessing for the day we mourn our dead (All Saints’ day)

Today we are drawn into remembrance. The complexity of love and loss both warms our hearts and chills our bones.

Invisible connections are revealed just as the light of the sun illuminates the lines of a web, we see that our lives are connected to those who are no longer here.

Blessed are we who acknowledge the impressions made by those who’ve passed a child’s nose, a joke carried on, a chair left in our name, a story that we now tell.

Blessed are you who have learned to make sense of a world that doesn’t make sense without them.

And blessed are you with grief present still
who carry the weight of surviving a loved one,
of keeping the memories and sharing the stories.

O God, you alone know the whole of it. You know their sufferings, their joys, their hopes, their winding paths and every movement of their souls.

Restore our souls, even as you receive theirs. welcome them in with the kind of embrace we wish we could give them.

Blessed is the time they were given and the time you now have.
whether in life or in death, love is there.

Yours in Christ,

Rev Michiko