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Good morning. November is a month of melancholic beauty. As autumn spreads its golden light through the treetops and pavements swish with the tumble of leaves, there’s a deep sense of endings and of an elemental silence creeping through life – the silence of winter and the dying of the light. The month begins with commemorations of the dead – All Hallow’s Eve with its Halloween skeletons and ghouls, and for many Christians the celebration of All Saints and All Souls Days. Fireworks bejewel the autumn nights, popping the silence with splutters and bangs which muffle the story of terror and torture associated with Guy Fawkes. Soon after comes Remembrance Day, with its proliferation of red and white poppies signifying increasingly contested interpretations of war and sacrifice. For Catholics like myself November is the month of the dead – a time when we’re called to be particularly mindful of our own mortality and the hope of the life to come, and to pray for our loved ones who have passed on. My Presbyterian childhood taught me that prayers for those beyond the grave were taboo, but it’s an aspect of the Catholic faith that I’ve come to cherish. It feels as if the membrane between this world and the next becomes thin, and memories become murmurations of love and loss passing between the two. When our loved ones die they so often leave a complex legacy of regret and guilt as well as mourning and longing. Praying with and for those who have passed away can be a way to articulate some of those confusing feelings as we struggle towards the peace of healing and acceptance. At the age of 64 I’m increasingly aware that part of the bittersweet reality of living into old age is learning to inhabit a world where our beloved dead begin to outnumber the living. That’s why I find myself reflecting on a quotation that somebody posted in social media recently, by Native American writer and environmentalist Linda Hogan. She writes of winter as “a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood.” She goes on, “Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.” Last week, as I lit a candle for my deceased parents and all my friends and loved ones who have gone before me, I felt that timeless history of love speaking in my blood and I was immensely comforted.