Worship with the saints
New and Old, Seen and Unseen
This Sunday, November 2, 2025, is All Saints’ Sunday. It’s our parish’s patronal Sunday, where we honor our “Feast of Title.” We transfer the liturgy from the actual day of All Saints’, which is always November 1, to the nearest Sunday so that we may make that Sunday’s worship stand apart, to celebrate all the fellow saints that we see in worship, as well as those saints that we see no longer.
This year All Saints’ Sunday is even more special, as it is also the date of the visitation of The Rt. Rev. Jennifer Brooke-Davison, who will also be celebrating at both services.
The 9 AM service will be elevated above what we usually experience, as we will have baptisms and confirmations at this service with the Bishop. I don’t want to say an exact number, as I may get it wrong, but I personally have never in my career of 23 years experienced so many people being confirmed at one time at the parish level. Now that’s certainly adding to the “great multitude of witnesses,” which is fancy for a “whole bunch of saints!”
The 11:10 AM service will be in contrast, as the focus will be on those saints that we no longer see. It is a Requiem Mass, which means that it is a Eucharist service that intentionally remembers and celebrates those who have died. Still, this service will be elevated above what is usually experienced on any other Sunday. The Choir of All Saints’ will offer John Rutter’s “Requiem,” as each movement will be used as part of this service’s liturgy. The choir will be accompanied by a small ensemble, including flute, oboe, cello, harp, and organ.
As a listener, I invite you to let the sound wash over you. Let it transport you. May there be moments where you catch a glimpse of the heavenly Jerusalem. May your senses be heightened to perceive the cloud of witnesses, composed of those who have loved us and helped shape us as Christians.
It’s my opinion that this is perhaps the most beautiful of his choral writing. Since I’m a church music nerd, I choose to end this piece with some insight and backstory into this composition that you’ll hear on Sunday. It’s an excerpt of a longer article by Tari O’Regan, “Rutter: Requiem/Anthems,” drawn from www.naxos.com.
The immediate success of this work, composed in memory of John Rutter’s father, who had died the previous year and whose initials grace the dedication, was nothing short of miraculous. In the first six months after publication it received over five hundred orchestral performances in America alone. The Requiem exudes an aura of consolation, brought about through Rutter’s own bereavement at the time, and is composed in a language which he describes as “one that [his] father might have enjoyed listening to.” It also draws inspiration from its musical ally and near-centennial forerunner, Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem (1888). This nineteenth-century work had a peculiar and suspect history of endless revisions, prompting Rutter to make his way in 1983 to the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Paris, where Fauré’s manuscript had recently come to light. Holding in his hand these delicate pages of musical history, with their obbligato interplay of solo instrumental and choral writing, Rutter envisaged a contemporary Requiem Mass far away from the vast, dark orchestrations and dramatic rhythms of those by Berlioz, Verdi or Britten. His would contain personal selections from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer in addition to the texts prescribed by the liturgy and, above all, it would be a “requiem of our time.”
The first and final movements (their texts taken from the Missa pro defunctis) serve as prayers to God on behalf of all humanity, with the opening death march in the “Requiem aeternam” seemingly softened during the final “Lux aeterna” into a heartbeat prefiguring a slower, more mystical return of the opening material, as if perceived in a dream. Similarly the brooding psalm “Out of the deep,” with its somber opening violoncello solo in C minor, is echoed in the lighter C major setting of its counterpart psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd,” this time with obbligato oboe. Interestingly, this latter movement bears the same relationship to the whole as Fauré’s “Libera me,” in that both movements existed as separate pieces for around ten years prior to being integrated into the fabric of the completed Requiem Mass. Two personal prayers to Christ, “Pie Jesu” and “Agnus Dei,” frame the central “Sanctus.” The interrelation of thematic material in symmetrical formation, interwoven with fragments of Gregorian chant, raises the Requiem to an altogether different plane. It ranks among the elite body of Mass settings imbued not only with aesthetic beauty but a sense of technical rigor.*