BBC Radio 4 2016-11-01

Good morning. Today and tomorrow, many Christians are celebrating the Feasts of All Saints and All Souls. Death is, in the words of Hamlet, ‘The undiscovered country, from whose bourn, No traveller returns.’ But these holy days seek to bridge the abyss between the living and the dead. Through ritual and imagination, they’re intended to reassure us that those who have died are not beyond our companionship and our prayers.

When I was out walking this weekend, I saw a little girl arranging pebbles on a clifftop overlooking the sea. She was spelling out the letters RIP, and a heart. I wondered what story of love and loss lay behind her poignant message in that beautiful place. She was expressing something so much deeper and more haunting than the ghoulish festivities of Halloween can accommodate.

Halloween takes its name from the phrase All Hallows Eve, marking the vigil of All Saints Day. In the western church, this ancient feast was moved to the same date as the Gaelic Festival of Samhain. Christianity sought to convert people by transforming rather than rejecting their culture.

This process of adaptation has made Christianity a global religion which has seeded itself in many different cultures and contexts. Sometimes this has been achieved by reprehensible methods of violence and force, but often those who were enslaved and colonised took the faith of their oppressors and made it their own. No religious tradition can survive unless it’s relevant to the messy realities of people’s everyday lives, and gives meaning to their deepest struggles, sorrows and hopes.

Death is the most sorrowful and messy reality of all. It’s the only universal human truth, and the most impenetrable of mysteries. As a culture we’ve become alienated from the power of religious hope to reconcile us to the helplessness and even the despair we feel when confronted by death. In the belief that we should have absolute control over our own lives, we find it difficult to accept St Paul’s warning that ‘The last enemy to be destroyed is death.’

Christians believe The Feasts of All Saints and All Souls bring us into communion with the dead, not in order to frighten us but in order to console (us). These feasts are an invitation to reflect on what it means to be mortal and to seek reassurance that, terrifying though death is, it’s not the end. Love is more powerful than death, and life, not death, will have the last word.