At autumn’s turn to All Saints’, as leaves the colour of sunsets fall to the ground and in time bear fruit, we taste and see God’s mystic wholeness more fully. We break with the season’s cosy joys for the solemn silences of All Souls’, Remembrance Sunday, and Transgender Day of Remembrance, inviting the departed to enter again into our presence, and knowing ourselves invited into theirs. Crowding together with the leaves, we tell those who have died that we ‘re-member’ them, that in Christ we and they are one body.

We draw closer to strangers, too. Perhaps the simplest truth of the cenotaph and vigil is that, to remember the dead, we are to stand with the living. And if to stand in solidarity is to say that your life’s particularities cannot hinder us from godly fellowship, then to stand and remember those who have died, is to say that neither can the grave.

All Saints’ brings us closer to those branches of the true vine who in death bear yet more fruit, enjoying forever their solidarity with the risen Christ and His body on earth – us, the gathered crowd – and who share in that body’s pain. The saints stand with those who know the violent cost of truth and bravery, for they knew it too. They knew poverty, and stand with those now facing the sharp bite of a hungry winter, as the question "eating or heating?" floats on the colder winds back into our conversations. They knew the scourge of war, and the wordlessness of grief.

After our silences, we say to the fallen, and to each other, "no more". "Never again". All saints and all souls say it with us in holy solidarity, and quietly the Spirit stirs with the woodlouse and the earthworm to turn the leafmeal into new life.

Chris is one of the placement students at the University Church this year.