Art For All Saints' Day Feast
We are coming to the end of the Long Green Season, and the Feast of All Saints' offers a brief respite from the LGS prior to Advent. In my church for the Feast of All Saints' we read the names of those who died during the year with the sanctus bell rung following each name. It is hauntingly beautiful and reminds me that liturgy is, in and of itself, art. This year our Flower Guild is planning to use symbolic plants, such as rosemary for remembrance, to decorate the nave and provide a sprig to parishioners, as was the custom at funerals of old in the Church of England.
Does your parish have plans for incorporating art into its observance of All Saints'? Does your parish have particular customs to honor the saints? How might we enrich the observance with visual art?
Jan Neal
Does your parish have plans for incorporating art into its observance of All Saints'? Does your parish have particular customs to honor the saints? How might we enrich the observance with visual art?
Jan Neal
posted by ECVA | 7:15 PM
4 Comments:
The use of symbolic plants sounds both beautiful and meaningful. Would you mind posting more information about the plants you are planning to use, or perhaps a link to where to find out more about the customs on which your parish has drawn?
Many thanks,
Brie Dodson
While I know many of our churches do it, the conflating of All Saints -- the celebration of those who have been the mentors, heros and heroines of the church throughout the generations -- with All Souls -- the commemoration of all the faithful departed, saintly or not -- confuses the festal celebration of the "S" saints with the memory of our personal "s" departed loved ones.
It reinforces our American tendency to deny the reality of death (and waters down the observance of All Saints) with maudlin sentimental gestures and practices that have little place on the great feast of All Saints that on our calendar ranks in importance and solemnity with Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas/Epiphany.
If anything is to be added to All Saints, let it be a festal procession with banners honoring the saints and/or the baptismal rite that challenges us all to sainthood while enrolling new initiates into the Communion of Saints. Leave the reading of names, tolling of bells, singing of requiems, etc. for All Souls on 2 November or a midweek eucharist after All Saints Sunday.
In a small parish like mine we will celebrate All Saints and All Souls on November 6; we do not have separate services, nor would we likely see the need. I think that this is a common practice and, I agree, very American. I do not think that for us it is because we deny death as a reality; I believe it is because we, as Protestants (even Anglo-Catholic ones), do not see the need to offer prayers for our own departed in Purgatory since we do not think they are in Purgatory. In American style, we also democratically see our own departed as similarly worthy of honoring along with the saints recognized by the church.
I have not personally found that observing the communion of (all the) saints (at the same time) to be tearful or excessively sentimental. I am filled with joy that I am not separated from those I have known and loved or those I did not know but do admire, and I find a richness in the use of our symbols and traditions that connect us to our ancestors.
With that said, I am sensitive to the fact that different parishes have different approaches, and I can understand one's desire to separate these observances to give each its due.
Jan Neal
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