Letter from the Rector – November 2, 2025

Dear Friends of St. Paul’s,

This Sunday we celebrate one of the Episcopal Church’s high holy days: All Saints’ Day and the day after, All Soul’s Day.

All Saints’ Day (November 1) is the day we celebrate people who are exemplars in the faith—people who have gone before us and demonstrated how to live life with God.

This includes Red Letter Saints, people present in the New Testament like our namesake, St. Paul, and others like Phoebe.

Black Letter Saints are people whose lives the church commemorates. These include Benedict of Nursia, the father of modern monasticism, who died in 540, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who died at the hands of the Nazis in WWII.

All Saints are commemorated on the date of their death.

I write this on the anniversary of my mother-in-law’s death, an amazing woman of faith. The Anglican perspective is that while we honor specific people as exemplars, all of us who are following Jesus are being made saints. That brings me to the next special day: All Souls’ Day.

All Souls’ Day (November 2) allows us to remember those we know personally who have gone before us and are no longer with us.

This Sunday we will mark both All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day together. We remember those people throughout time that we look up to and learn from, holy people, saints. We specifically remember those we have lost to death this year on All Souls’. At St. Paul’s we take quiet time during the service to remember, to pray, to light candles, to grieve.

Through it all, we ask God to make us saints—to make us people who are following the way of Jesus. We love others, we muddle through life, we confess when we make a mess of it all. We live this life with God. And through it, God redeems us and makes us saints.

Let us celebrate All Saints’ and All Soul’s Day together.

In faith, love, and service,

holly+