November is usually regarded as a dreary mouth. The leaves finally detach themselves from the trees, and disrupt our railway services by dropping onto the line, the weather is questionable, the nights long. And then November is the traditional 'Month of the Dead'.

It would be a great pity to think of commemorating the dead as something dismal, though. It should be an occasion of hopeful and joyful remembrance.

The teaching of the Church is that there is, so to speak, more than one Church: there is the Church of the living (on earth), the Church of the saints (in heaven), and the Church of those being prepared for heaven, those said to be in Purgatory, a state where they are made totally open to the will of God, free of the impediments of this earth. We believe that these Churches, though invisible to each other, still communicate with each other through the bond of prayer. We ask the help of the saints, we believe that they remember us before God in heaven, and we also pray for those who are being made fit for heaven. Although God can act without these prayers, we believe that he regards them dearly, as a precious sign of the communion of believers.

There are many ways of remembering the dead: we keep "All Souls' Day" and honour the war dead on Remembrance Sunday. We keep a Book of Remembrance as a token of that great Book which the Bible tells us God opens in heaven, and where all lives are recorded. We may ask for Masses to be said, and, if appropriate, we visit the places where our loved ones' bodies or ashes are buried.

Is it my imagination or are we losing something of the old November traditions? That would be a pity; to lose the power of memory is a sign of a civilisation that is adrift. We staid English will probably never be able to imitate the Mexicans who keep the Day of the Dead with sugar-candy skulls and crossbones, heaps of marigolds (the flower of the dead - some cultures use chrysanthemums) and tequila parties in cemeteries where the dead are invisibly in places of honour for the feast. But it would be a bad day for faith if all our memorial of the dead was swept away, regarded as 'spooky' or morbid. We Catholics have always had a tradition of being on easy terms with death and the dead and why not? For the dead are not dead; they are well and truly alive. A good idea would be to spend half an hour making a list of all the dead known to us whom we wish to honour, and then to read out their names quietly to ourselves each day - our own little Cenotaph, in fact. DS