The Black and the Gold

Once upon a time, the relationship between All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day was clear. On the first, the Church remembered all those - including the nameless - whose sanctity had propelled them into the immediate post-mortem presence of God, especially those who were recognised publicly by the Church as souls whose intercession could be sought by ordinary worshippers, dwelling spiritually as they did in the curtilage of Divinity. All Souls was for the rest of us, who had first to pass through the fires of Purgatory before we attained the Sublime, and who, far from praying for the living,  required their intercessions to speed our passage through. All neat and tidy.

At least in the fully-developed Western tradition: the East had never got that far, and didn't draw hard-and-fast lines between different categories of Christians. I've long come to the view that the wonderful side-by-side contrast of All Saints and All Souls on successive days in the Church calendar - the Gold and the Black - represent, in a way, our different attitudes to the dead, to perhaps conflicted feelings of thankfulness and joy mingled perhaps with fear, sorrow, regret and maybe even anger. But I hadn't thought this year about the two days embodying different feelings about death itself, even though this is really quite an obvious extension of the theme. If we are Christians, we know that Christ has won the victory over sin and death, and that we are part of it. But equally we know that we do not deserve to be part of it, that we remain sinners, in need of repentance; and the saints are the very first to kneel, and strike their breasts, and say, 'Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner'. Confidence and humility, hope and realism, all work together: together in the sight of God are woven the Gold and the Black.