... to all Celts who happen to be reading.

Not entirely sure of the pronunciation of Samhain, the Celtic name of the festival subsumed first by All Hallows and then by Hallowe'en/Halloween, but it marked the start of the new year for the ancient Celts and, indeed Samhain remains the Celtic name for November.

The ancient missionaries new a thing or two about inculturation - how to look and listen to local custom and practice and spot the echoes and glimpses of what is spoken more profoundly in their Christian experience.  For ancient Celts the end of the harvest and cleansing of the earth with bonfires (hint - where do you think bonfire night comes from really?) coincided with the darkening of the year.  As the natural end of the growing cycle came and with it the slaughter of animals for food (hence the bone-fires), so there was a sense of 'thinness' between life and death, this world and the next.  Enter the Celtic Christians and, later, the Romanised Christians who developed the feasts of All Hallows and All Souls, commemorating and, in a more literal sense of the 'communion of saints', connecting with the 'faithful departed.'

For those of with strong protestant heritage such festivals are a little uncomfortable, yet I think they do have the potential to to remind us of important truths - our interconnectedness with the rest of creation, of the whisper-thin veil between life and death, of our own mortality, of those who have gone before us, saints official or unofficial, and of the new beginnings that can be marked on any day of any month.

Among our songs today is a childhood favourite of mine, which reminds us of the ordinariness of God's saints who we can encounter anywhere, "I sing a song of the saints of God".  Unfortunately the words aren't in HymnQuest but it can be found at

BPW 248 (the red Baptist book)

BHB 259 (the green Baptist book)

JP 115

Sunday School Praise 453

Fresh Sounds (if anyone still has a copy!) 85

BBC Hymnbook 353

plus one or two others.

It can, however, be found online if you Google it, here's a Americanised version which does, alas lose my favourite lines about meeting saints "at school or in shops or at tea" and that they "began just like me" but it's not bad.

   I sing a song of the saints of God, 
   patient and brave and true, 
   who toiled and fought and lived and died 
   for the Lord they loved and knew. 
   And one was a doctor, and one was a queen, 
   and one was a shepherdess on the green; 
   they were all of them saints of God, and I mean, 
   God helping, to be one too. 
   
   They loved their Lord so dear, so dear, 
   and his love made them strong; 
   and they followed the right for Jesus' sake 
   the whole of their good lives long. 
   And one was a soldier, and one was a priest, 
   and one was slain by a fierce wild beast;
   and there's not any reason, no, not the least, 
   why I shouldn't be one too. 
   
   They lived not only in ages past; 
   there are hundreds of thousands still. 
   The world is bright with the joyous saints 
   who love to do Jesus' will. 
   You can meet them in school, on the street, in the store, 
   in church, by the sea, in the house next door; 
   they are saints of God, whether rich or poor, 
   and I mean to be one too.
     

If you don't know it you can listen here

PS In the unlikely event that any trick or treaters knock my door tonight, I might 'treat' them to the 'trick' of taking off my headscarf... cue mean cackling laughter.