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Good morning. Today in the Christian calendar it’s All Saints Day or All Hallows to give it its Gothic sounding name, following yesterday’s All Hallows’ Eve, Hallowe’en. All Saints offer the commercial opportunities of Hallowe’en: I certainly didn’t see any golden sugar halos or plastic harps on offer in the shops. Perhaps we see saints as po-faced in their perfect piety, plaster saints in every sense. But Hallowe’en and All Hallows belong together. In fact there’s a third day - tomorrow is All Souls, and the three together make up a mini-season around the theme of death and the afterlife. A recent survey for Co-Op Funeral Care suggested that atheists and humanists are better than religious believers at talking about death. It was suggested that they might have less fear of death. I have to say as a Christian I get that. If we are no more than our bodies what is there to fear? Death is simply the snuffing out of any experience that I might have had, the end of me in every sense. Yet there remains a strong link between living and dying. If life has meaning so has death, and the sum of the choices we make in this life carries moral weight. Many people, whether religious or not, seek to die well, perhaps leaving a legacy of good works and hoping to be remembered with affection. In some eastern religions when we die our ego disappears but we leave a moral residue – karma which is passed on from life to life. In Christianity death is linked to judgement. I can no longer manipulate my past choices to say who I am and what I mean, everything has to be given up and given back to God. And that prospect brings, I think, a healthy fear as well hope. Saints are those who have become familiar with both hope and fear, so they live with what T.S Eliot called ‘a lifetime burning in every moment’. It is a paradox that the saints who are most aware of death and judgment often also seem to be most present in the everyday world. While they are in this life they strive to relish its joys and to resist the temptations to do evil or gain at another’s expense. You could say that they take life seriously and they take death seriously, but not themselves or their own short term interests. The three days around All Hallows can seem sombre as the days shorten and the darkness draws on, but I think they are also meant to be an encouragement, to give us a sense that we are accompanied in the struggle of this life, like having friends beside the race track cheering us on to the end. Perhaps we should invite the Bake-Off contestants to invent an All Saints’ cake - plenty of marzipan for me, please, and fruits generously soaked in spirit.