This Week from Mitch
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Happy Halloween! I hope and pray that this email finds everyone well. I also hope you get to laugh and enjoy some of the day's festivities. My day has been and will be a day of costumes and candy. It began with dropping Lydia off at a pre-dawn costumed track workout, and it will finish with a promenade through the neighborhood with some friends whose kids still require parental trick-or-treating assistance.
It's fun to dress up, to be someone else for a night, to laugh, play, and celebrate. It is also a very old Christian tradition. All Hallows Eve used to be a day of harvest festivities, when people celebrated being alive and having enough for the coming winter. It was a day when people gave thanks for cheating death for one more year! When combined with the feast of All Saints, which we will celebrate on Sunday, All Hallows Eve became a day of celebration followed by a day of thankful remembrance.
There is something good and natural about the rhythm of these two days. I give thanks for my life. I give thanks for walks with my wife, early morning practices, and bike races. I give thanks for my job, my family, and my friends. What do you give thanks for?
I also give thanks for those who have gone before me and helped shape me into the person I am today – family members, loved ones, countless friends, and parishioners for whom I have done funerals over the years. Each has left a mark on my heart and in my soul.
Who do you give thanks for? We each are blessed to be alive. We each have been blessed by those who have gone before. For both, let us give thanks.
In Christ,
Mitch
A Collect for Halloween:
Almighty and ever-living God, you have made all things in your wisdom and established the boundaries of life and death: Grant that we may obey your voice in this world, and in the world to come may enjoy that rest and peace which you have appointed for your people; through Jesus Christ who is Resurrection and Life, and who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.
