Thought for the Day 30th November

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For better or worse, the clocks go back tonight and the darkness is about to get deeper. The Celtic Festival of Samhain was celebrated about now. It marked the end of summer and the official start of winter. The arrival of short days and long nights represented that moment in creation when the boundary between this world and the next was said to be at its thinnest. So the evil spirits, which could easily transfer from one world to another had to be fended off by lighting fires, eating special foods, dressing up. The Celts had faith that the light would persist.

The link between Halloween and Samhain seems obvious, though the actual name Halloween seems to have derived from a corruption of the Scottish festival of “All Hallows Eve”. And that’s because Christians also use this time of the year to celebrate All Saints and All Souls. The great saints of the church are commemorated followed by those all those souls whose example is a source of inspiration to us.

I personally have no problem with Halloween. It’s now a 21st century heavily marketised campaign about the battle between light and darkness. What’s wrong, particularly in teaching our children, that we look for protection from darkness with a longing that the light always shines through; that truth and justice might always overcome the ways of evil?

But it’s back to that that Celtic notion of now being the thinnest time between this world and the next which intrigues me most. Of all spiritual questions – what happens next? – where does this life lead us? – are amongst the most prevalent when I talk to people about faith.

Next week, the British Museum presents a new exhibition featuring the 3000 year old Egyptian Book of the Dead. It is evidence that even a thousand years before the Incarnation people were asking exactly the same type of questions and trying to influence where they and their loved ones would end up: The Exhibition will show that questions should as “What happens in the afterlife? What can I hope for? Why am I afraid?” have always been part of the mystery of life and death for every human person.

When St John writes in his Prologue that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it, he underlines that much of Jesus’s teaching deals exactly with these kinds of questions. Faith is interpreted as a pathway through all the periods of doubt and darkness which affect every human spirit. Faith is not a way round them.

At this thin spiritual time of the year when the religious and secular join together in waging war on all that is evil – it is to those very saints and souls who have gone before us that we look: they are more than a source of encouragement and example.