guardian: Over in the vicarage, my teenage girls are tearing the place down getting ready for Halloween. The younger one is thinking about a zombie bride look and has drawn bones on her limbs with a marker pen. The eldest has decided to go with a ghoulish version of Marsellus Wallace’s wife from Pulp Fiction, complete with snot and blood pouring from her nostril.
While all this is going on, I am sitting quietly in church next door, escaping the chaos and contemplating a list of names my congregation has submitted of loved ones who have recently died and for whom they have asked me to pray. It strikes me that the Eve of All Hallows has a much friendlier attitude towards the dead than Halloween. A dozen or so of my congregation join me for an evening service. There isn’t much chat tonight, just an atmosphere of loving, mournful concentration, as people sit with the memories of their wife, husband, lover, friend, mother, daughter, son. I try and recall all those I have buried – both saints and sinners. A few tears roll in the darkness. Afterwards, there is a palpable sense of emotional solidarity.
Christian and post-Christian/secular attitudes to the dead in modern Britain still share much in common. Not only does Halloween piggyback on an ancient Christian festival, but many of the rites and ceremonies of the secular funeral borrow their stage directions from religious equivalents: they generally last a certain amount of time, they have readings and singing, often in a sandwich-type arrangement, often a few moments of quiet, sometimes candles. I often take non-religious funerals for friends and they feel remarkably similar as events.