The Sunday within the Octave of All Saints
2 November 2025
O Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow thy blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys which thou hast prepared for those who unfeignedly love thee; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
Ecclesiasticus 44:1-10, 13-14
Revelation 7:2-4, 9-17
Matthew 5:1-12
Whenever I think of All Saints Day, or even when I hear the phrase “All Saints,” there is one specific image that pops into my head. Well, it is actually five separate images pieced together by my brain: five relatively small paintings by the early fifteenth-century Florentine painter and Dominican friar, Fra Angelico, which you can see in the National Gallery in London (and also very nicely in high resolution on their website) (1). They are predella panels. This means they are small, rectangular paintings that sit in the overall frame of an altarpiece, immediately below the large central panel. In this case, they are the orphaned (or, more precisely, sold-off) predella panels of an altarpiece Fra Angelico painted for his own Dominican friary of, you guessed it, San Domenico in the town of Fiesole, which sits on a hill just to the north of Florence, looking down on the city.
The large central panel of the altarpiece, which is still in Fiesole, shows the Virgin and Child seated on a throne in an architectural setting. This Madonna in majesty, or Maestà as the people who commissioned it would have called it, is surrounded on each side by two saints. To the left (from our viewpoint) are Saint Thomas Aquinas and the apostle Barnabas, and to the right are Saint Dominic and another Dominican saint, Peter of Verona. Now, what you would expect to find depicted in the predella panels of this very Dominican altarpiece would be scenes from the lives of each of the men and, perhaps, a scene from the infancy of Christ in the centre. That would be usual. In this way, you would get to see the saint standing in the court of heaven with Our Lord and Our Lady and be reminded of an episode from his life. But no.
The five predella panels in the National Gallery don’t just show scenes from the lives of three Dominicans and an apostle, but show us, on a gold background, the entire heavenly court with the Risen Christ at its centre, surrounded, in expanding circles, by angels, then Our Lady at the head of the apostles and martyrs, followed by rows and rows of assorted early Christian and medieval saints (lots of popes, bishops, and other religious), even the patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament, and finally a healthy pack of Dominicans rounding out the image on the far end of both sides. Here we have all the saints. Here we have my own knee-jerk, gut, primal image of All Saints and All Saints Day. Dressed in their recognisable outfits, holding the instruments of their martyrdom or other objects associated with their lives, here they all are, with their halos and inhabiting a vast and timeless golden space.
When I look closely, I pick out some of my favourites: Paul, Francis, Jerome, Agnes, Catherine of Alexandria, Lawrence, and Stephen. I see Catherine’s wheel, the grill on which Lawrence was cooked, and the stones that they threw at Stephen. I even spot King David with his name inscribed on his lyre (or whatever it really is called). All the Saints. The ones who from the beginning bore witness to the mighty works of the God of Israel, the ones who first followed Jesus, who died for him gruesomely in those first centuries, who built up and led the Church, who showed the Church new ways of praying and understanding the work and ministry of Jesus in relation to our lives – I’m thinking of you, Francis, whose focus upon the poor and marginal I also hear in the Beatitudes from today’s Gospel from Saint Matthew. Yes. They are all there for me to examine and ponder, and to delight in the artist’s mastery and attention to detail. But when I step back, and really think of all the saints, and what we are doing here on All Saints Day, I feel that there is something missing.
And it’s not just one thing, so this needs some working out. First, humanity did not stop producing saints in 1425, so there are lots of saints since then that we don’t see in these little jewel-like paintings – ones named as such by the Roman Church, ones we Anglican count in our calendars and books. We can collect images of these saints in everything from Baroque paintings to the statues on the chancel parapet of our own Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and on the façade of our Synod House. If it’s your thing (it’s not mine), you can buy devotional pictures and statuettes of John Henry Newman, Mother Theresa, Padre Pio and many more. You can look through history books, and walk the galleries of museums and see images from Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Moore to Florence Nightingale and William Temple to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Luther King, Jr. And these kinds of images may be the ones that your mind conjures at the mere thought of All Saints Day. These are all good images – well, most of them. All of them, the ones shown by Fra Angelico and all those other, they are counted amongst those who ruled in their kingdoms, and were ... renowned for their power, giving counsel by their understanding, and proclaiming prophecies; leaders of the people in their deliberations and in understanding of learning for the people, wise in their words of instruction; those who composed musical tunes, and set forth verses in writing. But still, when I really begin to think about what today means to us, here, now, there is still a big hole, a void.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned how when I preached on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, I wondered if this apostle, about whom almost nothing is known other than that he was devoted to Our Lord from the beginning, might be the patron saint of all those who have gone before us, the specifics of whose deeds are lost to time. And I think that these are the ones who fill that void space, who fill it to bursting. Quite famously, today’s lesson from Ecclesiasticus reminds us:
And there are some who have no memorial, who have perished as though they had not lived; they have become as though they had not been born, and so have their children after them. But these were men of mercy, whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten; their posterity will continue for ever, and their glory will not be blotted out. Their bodies were buried in peace, and their name lives to all generations.
And I don’t think that these forgotten ones are simply the all the faithful departed whom we will commemorate tomorrow. These people, of whom little or no memory remains, were examples of faith and virtue in their day, to their friends and neighbours, and beyond, just as potent as the ones we know. Now, we may have a painted image of some, like that of Saint Peter of Verona depicted in the San Domenico altarpiece, whose deeds I certainly don’t know and who does not even get a Wikipedia page of his own. We may have a reference in a book or perhaps even an entire book written by them. But ostensibly we have forgotten all about them, and yet their deeds may have been as great as any of the saints whose images fill museum galleries, the tales of whose deeds fill volumes and volumes. We can not think of All Saints Day without the commemoration of all those whose devotion, whose faith, whose love was great as any of those whom we remember by name and deed.
So I’ll do something I don’t do very often. I’m going to ask us all to close our eyes and imagine a gold background, at the centre of which we see Our Lord as a baby seated on Our Lady’s lap. And think for a minute about what it would look like if all the saints, the ones “who have no memorial, who have perished as though they had not lived; [who] have become as though they had not been born,” were suddenly standing there in the Court of Heaven. When I do this, I see something bursting off the edges, and find myself even more inspired, even more moved to respond to the world in Love, than when I look at that beautiful Fra Angelico.
Andrew Charles Blume ✠
New York City
All Saints Day, 1 November 2025
© 2025 Andrew Charles Blume
1. Links to view the paintings mentioned above:
Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven (Central Predella Panel)
The Virgin Mary with the Apostles and Other Saints (Inner Left Predella Panel)
The Forerunners of Christ with Saints and Martyrs (Inner Right Predella Panel)
The Dominican Blessed (Outer Left Pilaster Panel)
Dominican Blessed (Outer Right Pilaster Panel)
All predella panels together
The Fiesole Altarpiece