Running from Sunday 4th October to Sunday 22nd November, this season weaves together a variety of lives, ancient and contemporary, into a deeper sense of the Communion of Saints. In each week of the season, we dig into a fundamental tension raised by the theme of the Sunday. We want to explore that it is messy business pursuing a faithful life. Where we spend a Sunday with a named person from the church’s calendar, it is worth resisting the soft-focus version of that saint. Instead, we can lean into the ways in which their saintliness was expressed in their lifetime and how it resonates today. Any lections can be used but the Exciting Holiness website is a great starting point.  

• Francis of Assisi — His life holds together joy, renunciation, creation, poverty, and community, exposing the tension between delight and letting go.
• Edith Cavell — Her care, courage, and conscience reveal the tension between duty and cost, asking what it means to act rightly when it is dangerous.
• Luke the Evangelist — His ordered account holds attention, evidence, and faith together, raising the tension between what can be explained and what cannot.
• Teresa of Ávila — Her renewal of prayer and community exposes the tension between deep inner experience and the demands of ordinary life.
• All Saints / All Souls — Memory, hope, grief, and thanksgiving meet in the tension between holiness and imperfection in real, unfinished lives.
• Remembrance Sunday — Honour, grief, and truth are held together without softening the brutality of war, exposing the tension between remembrance and its object.
• Talents Sunday — What is given and what is used are brought into the open with joy, recognising the Communion of Saints in the life we are already living.
• Christ the King — The season gathers under Christ’s rule, where faithfulness, failure, courage, and cost belong to one lordship rather than separate stories.