Biographies of common prayer · Part 3 of 3
The collect for All Saints: knit together in Christ
O Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord: Grant us grace so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys, which thou hast prepared for them that unfeignedly love thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
— All Saints’ Day, The Book of Common Prayer (1662)
On All Saints’ Day, November 1, the Church gives thanks for a fellowship extending beyond the people gathered in any one congregation. Apostles and martyrs, teachers and faithful Christians whose names have passed from memory belong to the people God has gathered in Christ. The collect begins with that gathering. Before asking for anything, we confess that God has knit his people together in the body of his Son.
The request that follows concerns the life we are to lead within this communion. We ask for grace to follow the saints and to reach the joy God has prepared. Fellowship, holiness, and hope belong together in the prayer. Its history helps us understand how the Church came to give them this particular expression, and what we receive when we make these words our own.
Receiving an inherited feast
The English collect first appears in the Prayer Book of 1549 and is conventionally attributed to Thomas Cranmer. It was a new composition for an established feast, received into the first English Prayer Book along with much of the Church’s calendar and its appointed biblical readings. The earlier celebration can be explored through the Sarum use, the form of medieval worship associated with Salisbury and widely used in England before the Reformation.[1]
The Sarum feast-day collect celebrated God’s gift of honoring the merits of all the saints—their holy lives and deeds—in one festival. It asked him to bestow the abundance of his reconciling mercy through their many intercessions. The saints appeared as a multitude of advocates whose prayers assisted those still making their earthly pilgrimage. The day’s prayer after Communion continued this theme, asking that the faithful might rejoice in honoring the saints and receive protection through their continuing supplications.[2] The feast’s readings included Revelation’s multitude before the Lamb and the Beatitudes, which the English Prayer Book would retain.[3]
On the eve of the feast, October 31, the Sarum vigil collect asked God to increase his grace and enable worshippers, through faithful Christian living, to attain the joy of the saints whose feast they were about to celebrate. The Gospel appointed for the vigil was Christ’s prayer for his disciples in John 17:11–26[4], with its petitions for their sanctification and unity, and its desire that they should be with him and behold his glory.[5]
Grace, holy living, and a shared destination therefore belonged to the earlier celebration alongside the saints’ intercession. These prayers disclose a Church looking toward the company of heaven and asking for help on the way there. The English Prayer Book would give that longing a new form.
A prayer for the body of Christ
The collect introduced in 1549 begins with God’s action in making the Church one. Its opening confession names the fellowship in which the congregation prays: the elect, God’s chosen people, have been joined together in Christ’s mystical body. The people whom he has gathered approach him as members of his Son.
“Mystical body” gives this fellowship its depth. Christians are united through their participation in Christ’s life. Their belonging to him joins them to one another, across differences of place and generation, and across death itself. When a congregation prays this collect, its visible assembly belongs within that larger communion. The saints being remembered share with the worshippers a life received from the same Lord.
Within this confession, the English prayer asks God for grace to follow the saints in virtuous and godly living. The earlier feast collect had sought mercy through their intercession; the English petition asks God to bring their faithfulness to expression in the lives of those honoring them. The saints’ example becomes a means of learning to live within the body to which God has joined us. His grace enables us to share in the holiness for which we give thanks.
The Communion service in which the collect first appeared helps us hear the strength of that fellowship. In 1549, the intercessions within the Eucharistic prayer thanked God for the grace and virtue shown in his saints, naming the Virgin Mary, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs. They asked for the ability to follow their examples of steadfast faith and obedience. The service then commended the faithful departed to God’s mercy and prayed that living and departed members of Christ’s body might share the joy of the general resurrection. The petition concluded through Christ as the sole mediator and advocate.[6]
After receiving Communion, worshippers gave thanks for being incorporated into his body and made heirs of his Kingdom. They asked for grace to continue in that fellowship and to do the good works God had prepared for them. The collect’s account of the Church could therefore be heard throughout the service: membership in Christ carried both a promise and a calling.
The prayer’s continuing life
The revision of 1552 changed this surrounding service considerably. Its intercession was explicitly directed toward Christ’s Church militant—the Church still living and struggling on earth—and the passages naming the saints and commending the departed were omitted. The All Saints collect continued, as did the thanksgiving connecting membership in Christ’s body, hope of the Kingdom, and grace for good works, now offered as one of two prayers after Communion.[7]
In 1662, thanksgiving for the departed appeared again in the Communion intercession. The Church blessed God for those who had died in his faith and fear, asking for grace to follow their good examples, “that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom”.[8] The 1549 intercession had also asked for mercy and peace for the departed themselves. The renewed commemoration takes the form of thanksgiving for their lives and a petition for our faithfulness and final fellowship with them. The All Saints collect’s request to follow the saints into shared joy thus finds a close companion in the regular intercession of the Church.
Through these revisions, the collect itself remained substantially stable. The early English prayer spoke of following the holy saints in all virtues and godly living; the familiar 1662 form asks us to follow the blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living.[9]
The prayer remains recognizable in contemporary Anglican worship. The Anglican Church in North America’s 2019 book retains the collect, using “ineffable” for the older “unspeakable” joys and “truly” for “unfeignedly” loving God. It also identifies All Saints as one of the particularly fitting occasions for Baptism.[10] At the feast of the whole communion, new members are received into the Church. The collect’s acknowledgment of God gathering his people acquires an immediate expression in the congregation’s worship.
Learning the life of this fellowship
The inherited readings give substance to the fellowship and holiness for which the collect prays. In Revelation 7:2–12[11], the servants of God are sealed as his own, and an innumerable multitude from every nation stands before the throne and the Lamb. Their salvation belongs to God and the Lamb, and their common life takes the form of worship. The collect’s fellowship has this breadth and this center. God gathers a people whose differences of nation and language are held together in praise.
To pray as members of this communion enlarges our understanding of the Church. The congregation in which we have learned to worship belongs to a people whose life has unfolded through centuries and across the world. Christians have received the Gospel, suffered for it, taught it, and given it expression in works of love under circumstances very different from our own. In their lives, we encounter the grace of the Lord to whom we also belong.
The Gospel, Matthew 5:1–12[12], gives that holiness shape. Jesus blesses the poor in spirit, the meek, those who hunger for righteousness, and those who suffer for his sake. He says, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy” (NRSV). Mercy and peacemaking become particular ways of understanding the virtuous and godly living for which the collect asks. The people honored at this feast have followed Christ along the paths his Gospel describes.
“Grant us grace” makes their example an invitation to dependence on God. We can recognize courage or patience in another Christian and desire to grow in it ourselves. The prayer gives that desire an address. We bring it to the God whose grace bore fruit in the life we admire, asking him to sustain faithful action in our own circumstances. A life of patient care may teach us something about perseverance; a costly act of forgiveness may help us see what mercy requires. In each case, thanksgiving for another’s faithfulness becomes a request for our own growth.
The 1549 morning lessons for All Saints included Hebrews 11:33–12:7a, moving from the achievements and sufferings of the faithful into the call to persevere with attention fixed on Jesus.[3] That movement gives further depth to following the saints. Their witness directs us toward the Lord whose faithfulness sustains the whole fellowship. Within this communion, Christians learn to endure and to receive the discipline through which God forms his children.
The petition ends with the joys God has prepared for those who sincerely love him. The older word “unspeakable” names a happiness beyond our ability to express. The Church asks to reach that joy together, continuing toward the fulfillment of a fellowship already given in Christ. Its hope embraces resurrection and the common life of God’s people in his Kingdom.
This promised end bears upon the life we lead now. The mercy we practice, the faithfulness we learn, and the love of God in which we grow belong to the life toward which the collect directs us. The saints give us grounds for gratitude and encouragement as we ask for that growth. Their witness can sustain a congregation whose members are tired, uncertain, or conscious of how much they still need to learn.
When we pray the collect, we receive a history of Christians seeking mercy, holiness, and fellowship with God’s people. The English prayer gathers that inheritance into a confession of the body of Christ and a request for grace to follow the saints. We ask the God who has joined us to his Son to form our living within that communion, until we come with his saints to the joy he has prepared.
1549, 1552, and 1559 saints’ day propers, under All Saints; Francis Procter and Walter Howard Frere, A New History of the Book of Common Prayer, chapter XIII, discussion of newly composed saints’ day collects. For the Cranmer attribution, see the Prayer Book Society’s “Commemorating all the Saints” (2006). ↩︎
A. Harford Pearson, The Sarum Missal, in English (1868), pp. 459–460, feast of All Saints. For the Latin prayers, see Giacomo Baroffio, Orationale Sanctorum Italicum (2021), p. 97. ↩︎
Pearson, Sarum Missal, pp. 459–460 and p. 489, Gospel II in the Common of Many Martyrs; the early English propers cited above. The English Gospel adds the concluding sentence about the prophets to the Sarum reading. The early English propers also give the 1549 morning lesson from Hebrews. ↩︎ ↩︎
Pearson, Sarum Missal, pp. 457–458; Baroffio, Orationale, p. 96, vigil of All Saints. ↩︎
1549 Communion order, intercession beginning “Almightie and everliving God” and thanksgiving after Communion. ↩︎
1552 Communion order, intercession following the offertory and thanksgiving after Communion. ↩︎
1662 Communion order, reproduced from the 1762 Baskerville printing, conclusion of the intercession. For the addition in 1662, see Michael Kennedy, The Book of Common Prayer (2004): Commentaries (2011), Commentary Two, p. 24. ↩︎
Compare the early English propers cited above with the 1662 collect. ↩︎
Book of Common Prayer (2019), p. 622, collect for All Saints; p. 161, directions for Baptism on All Saints’ Day or the following Sunday. ↩︎