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"Do not be afraid..."
All Hallows’ Eve in Northstowe
All Hallows’ Eve in Northstowe
Each year, around the end of October, we make space in Northstowe to gather around firelight, stories, creativity and conversation.
All Hallows’ Eve is the evening before All Saints’ Day — part of an old Christian rhythm of remembering those who have gone before us, facing honestly the reality of death, and holding onto hope.
The name Halloween is itself a contraction of All Hallows’ Eve. Over time, the evening has gathered many different customs and meanings around it, including traditions shaped by older seasonal practices such as Samhain, as well as the pumpkins, costumes and trick-or-treating familiar today.
People come to those traditions with very different beliefs and experiences. Our gathering doesn’t require everyone to interpret them in the same way.
It simply makes room to notice what this season might have to say.
A blessing of darkness as well as light
A blessing of darkness as well as light
At this time of year, the clocks change and darkness suddenly becomes much more noticeable.
Church language can sometimes make darkness sound as though it is always something bad and light always something good. Real life is more complicated.
Darkness can be frightening. It can speak to us of grief, uncertainty, loneliness and things we cannot see.
But darkness can also be rest, shelter and mystery. It is where seeds begin to grow, where our bodies sleep, where stars become visible and where a small flame suddenly matters.
So our All Hallows gatherings have often explored a blessing of both darkness and light.
We do not need to pretend that difficult things are not difficult. Nor do we need to rush to fill every dark space.
Christian hope is not the claim that darkness does not exist. It is the much more stubborn claim that darkness does not finally have the last word:
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
John 1.5
Around a campfire, that stops being merely an idea. The darker the evening becomes, the more clearly we see the light we are gathered around.
Remembering
Remembering
All Hallows also leads us into All Saints and All Souls: days when Christians remember the great company of people who have travelled this road before us, including those whom we have known and loved ourselves.
That means there is room for memory here too.
Some memories make us smile. Some still hurt. Sometimes grief arrives unexpectedly. Sometimes children ask wonderfully direct questions about death that adults have learned to avoid. We don’t try to provide tidy answers. Instead, we make space to remember, to give thanks, to be sad when we need to be, and to entrust those we love to God.
For Christians, remembering the dead belongs within a larger hope: that love is stronger than death and that, in Christ, death is not the end of the story.
An ordinary patch of Northstowe
An ordinary patch of Northstowe
Over the years this has happened in very Northstowe ways: around campfires and lanterns, in gardens and shared spaces, with hot chocolate, marshmallows, stories, prayers, children making things and conversations that go in directions we could never have planned. We are not trying to recreate a medieval All Hallows vigil or compete with Halloween. We are discovering what an old Christian season might look like here, among the people actually living in one of England’s newest towns. Sometimes that means prayer; telling a story; sitting beside someone at a fire. Sometimes it means handing over another marshmallow. All of those can be ways of making room for one another — and perhaps for God.
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