From the Rector

Allhallowtide
Allhallowtide, Hallowtide, Allsaintstide, or the Hallowmas season is the Western Christian season encompassing the triduum of All Saints' Eve (Halloween), All Saints' Day (All Hallows') and All Souls' Day, as well as the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church (observed on the first Sunday of November) and Remembrance Sunday (observed on the second Sunday in November) in some traditions.  The period begins on 31 October annually.  Allhallowtide is a "time to remember the dead, including martyrs, saints, and all faithful departed Christians." 
            ~ from Wikipedia
 
My dear family in Christ,
 
We draw near to the next holy time in our Church year.  Though it is not a formally established liturgical season like Lent, Eastertide, Advent, or Christmastide, it is nonetheless a time of special observance that has been acknowledged as sacred and marked by practices of devotion, penitence, worship, and baptism since ancient times.  In our Anglican tradition, especially ~ perhaps as the Church in England (which predates the Church of England by centuries) had been influenced by the Celtic cultures of the British Isles ~ Allhallowtide is often understood to be a time when the so-called “veil” between this mortal life and the life to come becomes somewhat “thinner” than it is throughout the rest of the year.  Certainly, in the West, it seems natural and intuitive as we move into the season of harvest and the transition between the growing season of summer and the darker, colder, less vibrant season of winter to contemplate our mortality and the ultimate impermanence of the material world and our material lives.
 
All Hallows’ Eve
The vigil held in preparation for the observance of All Hallows’ (that is, All Saints’) Day developed alongside the development of All Saints’ Day itself.  Holding a vigil prior to a holy day of feasting or celebration is itself an ancient practice in the Church, the best known contemporary example being the Great Vigil between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday.  Early Christians having continued to follow the Jewish custom of marking the beginning of a new day at dusk rather than at midnight may have been an influence on the custom of holding a vigil (the term itself coming from Latin in the sense of “keeping watch”) the evening before the main observance.
 
The vigil held on the eve of All Hallows’ eventually gave us the English term Halloween, from All Hallow’s E’en.  The English language has a long and glorious tradition of squeezing words together to form a new word, and that’s what we did with Halloween.  It’s possible (according to Wikipedia) that the modern custom of trick-or-treating might have arisen from the practice of baking and sharing “soul cakes”:

The custom dates back at least as far as the 15th century and was found in parts of England, Wales, Flanders, Bavaria and Austria.  Groups of poor people, often children, would go door-to-door during Allhallowtide, collecting soul cakes, in exchange for praying for the dead, especially the souls of the givers' friends and relatives. This was called "souling."  Soul cakes were also offered for the souls themselves to eat, or the 'soulers' would act as their representatives.  As with the Lenten tradition of hot cross buns, soul cakes were often marked with a cross, indicating they were baked as alms.  Shakespeare mentions souling in his comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1593).  While souling, Christians would carry "lanterns made of hollowed-out turnips," which could have originally represented souls of the dead; jack-o'-lanterns were used to ward off evil spirits.
             ~ From Wikipedia
 
While both the origins and the current liturgical practice of All Hallows’ Eve are rooted in the somber contemplation of our mortality and the remembrance of those Christian souls who have passed into the nearer presence of our Lord, it is nonetheless wholly appropriate and quite okay for Episcopalians to enjoy Halloween.  It shouldn’t need to be said, but just to be clear, trick-or-treating, costume parties, scary movie marathons, and the like are good and joyful things to do, even as we prepare ourselves for the more solemn observances to come.
 
And for the record, just to be abundantly clear, there is nothing evil or satanic or otherwise diabolical about Halloween!
 
All Saints’ Day
All Saints’ Day, traditionally celebrated on November 1st in the West, is one of the seven principal feasts of the Church.  It developed in the early Church initially to commemorate the deaths of the holy martyrs.  By the Fourth Century, there were frankly too many martyrs to commemorate each one’s death separately, so the idea emerged to have a single major feast to commemorate them all. 
 
We need to take a moment to let that sink in.  Three hundred years into this new faith, so many people had given their lives for Christ—not merely in abstract devotion only, but also in actual fact:  willingly, literally dying for Christ—that it was not feasible to hold annual memorials for each of them individually.  The calendar simply wasn’t big enough.
 
From our corner of the world, in our time within history, here in this place, it is hard for most of us, myself included, to imagine, much less really to know, what it’s like to be a Christian in a time and place where you can be killed—executed by the state—for being Christian. 
 
I’d wager that many of us in this country and in this culture, when we think about what it might cost us to offer up our lives to Jesus Christ, think mainly of reorganizing our priorities, giving up certain things (maybe), taking on “difficult” goals like being kinder and less selfish in our dealings with other people.  And to be honest, I truly hope that you and I won’t have to think about much else other than that.
 
Because there are places in the world even today where simply gathering to worship Jesus Christ really does mean risking one’s actual life, just as it did in the early days of the Jesus Movement, under the shadow of the Roman Empire.
 
That is the testimony of the blessed martyrs, the saints whom we remember on this feast day.  The word “martyr” comes from the Greek word for “witness,” and in the early Church, it was believed that those who remained faithful to Christ in the face of suffering and death had offered to the world the highest and purest possible witness to the truth of the Gospel.
 
And that is what we commemorate and celebrate at the Feast of All Saints.  If it sounds like a big deal, it is!  It hearkens back to the origins of our faith tradition and invokes the very heart of the Gospel.  For us here in this parish, moreover, it serves as our “patronal feast.”  Since we are not dedicated to a single, particular saint, we wouldn’t normally think of ourselves as having a specific feast day for our “patron,” but since we are in fact dedicated to the entire body of the saints in light, I’d say this is also our feast day!
 
All Souls’ Day
All Souls’ Day is something a little bit different from All Saints’ Day.  The celebration of All Souls, observed on November 2nd in the West, emerged in response to a slightly different but equally important need in the church:  the need to remember and celebrate the lives of countless “unknown” baptized Christians in every generation who lived and died in the faith of Jesus Christ. 
 
“Unknown” in the sense of not having become famous as hermits, mystics, or martyrs on a grand scale, but known to each of us as parents, children, extended family, friends, neighbors—all of the children of God whose lives intertwine with ours in the great Communion of Saints.  Generations past and generations yet to come, all part of the “great cloud of witnesses” to the Gospel in their ordinary, individual lives.
 
In many places throughout the various Anglican communions around the world, and especially here in this country, All Souls’ Day is often folded into and blurred together with the observance of All Saints’ Day.  The All Saints liturgy will in such cases include a reading out of the names of those in the parish (and those connected to folks in the parish) who have died in the preceding year.  It is a good and holy practice, and it is something that has also been a tradition here and will continue to be for as long as we gather here to worship. 
 
Blessings,
Christopher+

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