Weekly letter from St Luke's - 3 November 2023

Dear Parish Friends This week we celebrate All Saints and All Souls. The morning services (7am Holy Communion 9am family service with communion - also streamed on Zoom) will focus on All Saints, whilst there will be a service of Evening prayer at 5pm for All Souls. The weekly notice paper and 9am service sheet are available via the links below. In some traditions All Saints and All Souls have a different focus. All Saints remembers the multitude of people who have faithfully followed Jesus in their lives (and for martyrs in their deaths too) throughout the two millennia of the Christian Church. Some are know, some are especially honoured by some parts of the Church, but the vast majority are unknown, but recognised all the same for their faith. All Souls is often described as a 'commemoration of the faithful departed', and for Christian traditions an opportunity to pray for their souls in Purgatory. My view is that all who have died in the faith are already, in the words of St Paul to the Corinthians (1 Cor 13:12), seeing face to face. We therefore give thanks for their lives and for the legacy they have left those of us who have come after. At our services this Sunday the focus will therefore be on the legacy of the whole Church. Those who have gone before us, and those of us still 'seeing in an image dimly' (to continue St Paul's analogy in 1 Cor 13:12). At our Evening Service we will however think particularly of those who have died who are known to us, and read their names as we light a candle in memory of the gifts that they shared with us. Yours in Christ Rev'd Timothy