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Good morning. The 31st October has been on our minds for months as the day we were to leave the European Union. But of course it’s also Hallowe’en, All Hallows’ Eve as we’ll have seen from the orange and black displays in the shops all through October. Hallowe’en is the first of three days traditionally given over to our relationship with the dead. It has parallels with days of the dead celebrated in other countries. To me these are a mix of the macabre and the mocking with often a pang of sadness. I was watching Walt Disney’s film Coco recently with its Mexican tragi-comedy of love and revenge from beyond the grave. In Britain Hallowe’en has an anarchic flavour, the grinning pumpkin heads, the disgusting green sweets suggesting slime. Children love it because there’s just enough of a shiver about it all for it to be exciting without being terrifying. As we grow older though I think death becomes more of a mystery as we have to deal with real loss and fear. Some experience the dead coming back in their dreams, as though they are always just beyond the horizon of our sight. I know there are religious people who shun Hallowe’en, but to me it represents the unavoidable fact that death and chaos are all around us. It is like the gargoyles and grotesques on the outside of churches, carved into corners, running down drainpipes. Death accompanies us whether we are aware of it or not, so I think it is important to have a sane relationship with it, as far as we can. We need space to confront our mortality, to experience our complicated feelings about the dead. Affection, anger, the wound of broken love, the fear that the demands of the dead still weigh on us. These instincts have inspired the Death Café movement, where people meet to talk about death and to eat cake together. I love that mix of solemnity and celebration. Death is real but life goes on. It’s a very human response to let a bit of the chaos out. And to know that beyond Hallowe’en is All Hallows itself, All Saints’ Day. The Saints represent to me what a human life can become when it is set on God and the great virtues: truth, beauty, goodness. In church we invariably sing Vaughan Williams’ marching song setting of the hymn For all the Saints, with its triumphant Alleluias. The Christian theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer once remarked that death is the great festival on the road to freedom. One day we will all join the vast multitude of the deceased. Perhaps Hallowe’en can help us move from chaos to solidarity, to cherishing our dead, while letting them go, and to being more aware of our transience even as we are challenged to make something of our lives. Forget Brexit, light up the pumpkin.