All Hallows' Eve: Harvest, the dark season, and the month of the dead

And Is it not enough that every year

A richly laden autumn should unfold

And shimmer into being leaf by leaf ...

All Hallows' Eve and words from Malcolm Guite's poem for Autumn come to mind. Today we bring the season of Harvest Thanksgiving, our yearly rejoicing in "A richly laden autumn," to a close. The pumpkins, nuts, and apples which decorated our churches for the Harvest festival now decorate our homes. Pumpkin soup and apple pie sit on the table. It is one last day of rejoicing in Autumn's bounty and the Harvest season, looking back on weeks when we have delighted in the divine goodness which has, for another year, "graciously given unto us the fruits of the earth in their season".

Sky and hills and woods are one, grey and dead.

Hard to believe there be daffodils,

That green things will happen again.

At night houses shine out in cries across fields of floodwater,

The cold of wet and wind like the cut of a spade

in a bare hand.

With All Hallow's Eve, mid-Autumn passes. Kenneth Steven's poem 'November' marks the passage from October's rich autumnal colours to November days, the days of late-Autumn: shorter, darker, colder. The "mellow fruitfulness" will be behind us. The trees bare, the approach of Winter evident. Part of the evocative character of the Eve of All Hallows is this passing over into late-Autumn days, the dark season of the year. We know darker days and "the year's midnight" now lies before us, days when the Evensong prayer 'Lighten our darkness' has deep resonance.

As he walked through the woods

in the late October twilight ...

he could not help but pause

every once in a while

at the crackle of leaves

from behind him like footsteps.

All Hallows' Eve brings us to November, the month of the departed. Christopher Yokel's poem 'October Twilight' points to the unsettling character of this time, the unsettling character of which the gothic and dark of All Hallows' Eve is a sign.

The month begins with All Saints' Day, embracing our prayerful commemoration of all the faithful departed, those to whom we are united "in one communion and fellowship". It passes into the solemn silence of Remembrancetide, as we gather at memorials bearing the names of those who fell in the the fields of Flanders and villages of Normandy, the deep waters of the Atlantic and skies over Europe. And it ends with Advent close, the great collect of the season first ringing out with its proclamation that Christ will return "in his glorious Majesty to judge both the quick and the dead".

It is a month when we may feel the departed closer to us: in stained glass and in churchyards, at war memorials and in dark days as Advent draws close. 

This month of the departed should make us uneasy and uncomfortable, for it confronts us with the truth that "in the midst of life we are in death". The unsettling character of All Hallows' Eve is a fitting start to the month, reminding us that the shallow verities of our age - rational, progressive, secular - cannot give account for the darkness, or comprehend death, or explain why we are unsettled and made uneasy by the ghostly, by the crackle of leaves behind us, sounding like footsteps, on this last day of October.