In many Christian churches, November 1 or the first Sunday in November is celebrated as All Saints Day, a national holiday in some Christian countries. In the U.S., a great number of congregations will join in singing, “For All the Saints,” a powerful hymn consisting of eleven verses, generally reduced to eight and, in some worship services – including mine – pruned back even further.
At my country church, we’ll sing five verses while coming forward to light candles in remembrance of those having gone to their reward this past year. I know this in advance having agreed to serve as organist this week, accurately describing my keyboard gifts as “adequate” and “willing”. I reduced the prelude somewhat (“Thaxted,” from the Jupiter movement of The Planets by Vaughan Williams’ contemporary, Holst) choosing instead to say a few words about this mighty hymn, more about the tune and its composer than about its equally deserving lyrics. The following is drawn from these comments.
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"For All the Saints" lyrics were written in the 1860s, words for a processional hymn authored by William Walsham How, who eventually became Anglican Bishop of Wakefield (England). Accordingly, it’s appropriate that we process to light memorial candles while singing this hymn. In 1906, a new melody composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams was melded with Bishop How’s lyrics. This hymn tune, “Sine Nomine” (literally, without a name), is in homage to ALL saints, including those not commemorated by name… saints “known and unknown”.
Ralph Vaughan Williams was a British composer who wrote operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces, and nine symphonies, over a sixty-year span. He insisted on the traditional British pronunciation of his first name, "Rafe"; apparently, it infuriated him when pronounced any other way… I promise to be careful.
“Rafe” was born to a well-established family in Gloucestershire, England. His father was a clergyman; his mother, the great-granddaughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the niece of Charles Darwin. Musically speaking, Vaughan Williams was a late bloomer, not finding his compositional voice until his late thirties, after studying in 1907–1908 with French composer Maurice Ravel. (Notably, Sine Nomine was composed in 1905, at age 33, before his full flowering as a composer.) Among Vaughan Williams’ closest friends was composer Gustav Holst, a friendship that often extended to providing the first review of one another’s work.
Two episodes stand out in Vaughan Williams’s personal life. The first is World War I. At the outbreak of battle, despite his age, 42, Vaughan Williams volunteered for military service and drove ambulance wagons in France and Greece. Second, twenty years later, in his sixties and devotedly married, he was “reinvigorated” by a love affair with a significantly younger woman – a four-decade age gap – a poet, Ursula, who became his second wife after the death of his first. Vaughn Williams was invigorated sufficiently that he worked through to his mid-eighties, completing his last symphony months before his death at age eighty-five in 1958.
All Saints Day is an opportunity to give thanks for ALL who have gone before us in faith, both famous and obscure, including loved ones now part of the “communion of saints”. One great mystery of faith is that when we gather around the Lord’s Table, we join with saints above as well as saints among us. When a work colleague and friend, the late Reverend Glenn Schoonover, first entered this sanctuary a dozen years ago, he expressed his fondness for our circular communion rail. No, Glenn, I said, semi-circular. He replied, “Ah, communion with the saints. The remainder of the circle we simply cannot see.” A truly magnificent concept.
In the hymn’s first verse, Bishop How points us heavenward, to the Church Triumphant, praising saints having finished their earthly mission. The hymn is addressed to God; it’s God we bless “for all the saints”… or, as Bishop How wrote initially, “for all thy saints.” According to one noted hymnologist (admittedly, a rather small field), “At its very beginning, this hymn draws attention to the quality essential to sainthood — faith. ‘Who thee by faith before the world confessed’ is the most important line in the hymn; the rest is background and scenery.”
Sine Nomine has been described as “one of the finest hymn tunes of the 20th century” and For All the Saints, “one of the greatest English hymns ever written”… judgments to which I can only respond, AMEN!
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I’m pleased to be part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. My colleagues: