All Saints Sunday (November 4) is the feast day we celebrate all the saints, known and unknown – a day we gather to offer up both love and loss in the hope-filled container of the Eucharistic celebration that promises us that we belong to love so great that it transcends even death.

Here at All Saints Church it is also our parish feast day – and our celebration includes a choral Requiem.

This year at 9:00 and 11:15 a.m. Coventry Choir will offer Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with soloists Kelci Hahn, Jessie Shulmann, Ryan Chatterton and Dylan Gentile, accompanied by chamber orchestra and organ played by Cherry Rhodes. Weicheng Zhao conducts.

Composed in Vienna in 1791 and left unfinished at the composer’s death, the Requiem was completed the next year by Franz Xaver Süssmayr. It stands as one of the great monuments of faith expressed in music.

The services includes a grand procession of the Memorial Book as the we all sing together the great All Saints hymn Sine Nomine “For all the saints.” And as we circle the church during that grand procession we recognize that we are a family gathered — gathered to grieve those we love but see no more and to rejoice in the good news we share as those who embrace together the promise of life eternal.

Many years ago a wise priest famously shared these words at a memorial service: “The only way you can lose a person is if you don’t know where they are.”

Yes, we grieve those we see no more — but they are not lost. We know where they are. And on All Saints Sunday they will be with us at All Saints Church — along with the angels and archangels and all that company of heaven as we all sing together “for all the saints.”

Join us: in person at 9:00 or 11:15 a.m. or via live-stream at 11:15.