Commontide
For Desiring God
O God, grant that we may desire you, and desiring you seek you, and seeking you find you, and finding you be satisfied in you for ever. Amen.
Liturgical Color: White/Gold
Proper 26 (October 30-November 5)
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, as we live among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Most liturgical texts are from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America.
The New Coverdale Psalter, © 2019 by the Anglican Church in North America. Used by permission.
The Feast of All Saints
Red Letter Day
All Saints' Day, kept on November 1, honours the whole company of the redeemed: not one saint but all of them, and chiefly those whose names no one now knows. It is a Principal Feast in the Book of Common Prayer 2019, one of seven, and the only one the Prayer Book permits to be kept a second time on the Sunday following. Its appointed Gospel, the Beatitudes, has stood unchanged in English use since 1549.
The feast has complex origins spanning several centuries and multiple developments. The earliest precedent is the Eastern practice of commemorating all martyrs on a single day, observed on the Sunday after Pentecost — a practice still maintained in Eastern Orthodoxy. In the West, Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Roman Pantheon as the Church of Santa Maria ad Martyres on May 13, 609 (or 610), establishing a Western feast of all martyrs on that date.
The shift to November 1 occurred in stages. Pope Gregory III (731-741) dedicated an oratory in St. Peter's Basilica to all saints on November 1. Emperor Louis the Pious, with Pope Gregory IV, mandated the November 1 observance throughout the Frankish Empire in 835, effectively establishing it as the Western date. The May 13 feast was eventually dropped.
The theological basis is patristic. Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome all articulate the communion of saints — the belief that the Church on earth and the Church in heaven form one body in Christ, and that the prayers of the saints benefit the living. The Apostles' Creed confesses the 'communion of saints,' and the feast gives this doctrine liturgical expression.
The vigil of All Saints — All Hallows' Eve, later Halloween — became the occasion for popular customs blending Christian and pre-Christian elements. The theological substance of the feast, however, lies in the communion of saints: the conviction that death does not sever the bond between Christians, and that the prayers of the faithful departed benefit the Church on earth. The white vestments and festive character of the day express the Easter hope: the saints have already passed through death to life.
The Eastern observance on the Sunday after Pentecost carries a different theological emphasis — linking the saints to the gift of the Holy Spirit, who empowers holiness in every age. The Western November 1 date, by contrast, places All Saints at the threshold of the dying season, immediately before the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed (November 2), creating a two-day liturgical meditation on death and hope.