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Dear Friends
The month of October is not particularly lively in the Church’s calendar. Harvest has been and gone and things remain fairly quiet until Advent. On 30 October we have our Patronal Festival on All Saints’ Sunday. On this day we give thanks for the many saints and martyrs of the past who do not have feast-day of their own. This will be a traditional service of choral matins and we will have a guest preacher in the form of the Revd Raymond Wallace. Fr Raymond is a retired clergyman, living in Luton, who has given incredibly faithful service to Kings Walden church where his ministry has been greatly appreciated. He has helped to hold the fort during the vacancy as well as upon many occasions when the previous vicar was attending to his world-church interests in the Caribbean. I gather that he has officiated at All Saints’ in the past before my time here.
On Thursday 2 November at 8pm we keep the lesser festival of All Souls. This is the day when we remember all the ordinary people who were neither saints nor prophets who have passed into the next world, especially those who have done so in the past year. They are your loved ones and mine, members of our families, of the church, tennis club, players, whist drives, dog-walkers and neighbours etc. Many of these people are already listed in our “RIP” book for remembrance in our prayers in church each week of the year. There are, however, always those who are left out as well as those known only to each of us. If there are any names you would like included in the prayers at that service please give them to me or to Ann Males in good time.
The very ideas of sainthood and of the faithful departed raise the thorny question of life after physical death. This is something which the Christian church proclaims without apology but, at the same time, it is a great stumbling-block for many people. During the 1960s there was considerable interest in existentialist philosophy. The proponents taught that the essence of the human being was of less importance than his existence. In other words, worry less
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