FOR ALL HALLOWS’ EVE

“And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

(T S Eliot, Little Gidding)

(For Christians, All Hallows’ Eve is the remembrance of those who have died in the faith of Christ. ‘Hallow’ comes from the Anglo-Saxon ‘halwe’, meaning holy, or a saint. The resurrection of Jesus means that those who live in his life, whether alive or now in his nearer presence, are one, and so our prayer is one).

PS the word ‘saint’ did not originally mean ‘specially holy’ but simply ‘a believer in Christ’.