Faces of the Saints

Kevin Grummett’s 2019 arts residency project

For 2019 our Arts Fund Committee decided to follow a different model for our community’s Artist-in-Residence. Where we have typically appointed one artist for a twelve month period, we determined we would accept applications for shorter residencies of between one and three months. It turned out to be a really interesting experience, with six artists appointed to short term residencies, working in an array of media. One of those artists was the photographer Kevin Grummett.

Over the course of several weeks that summer, Kevin brought his camera to Sunday evening worship, asking various people for permission to take a close-up photograph of his or her face. During the same time Kevin took photographs of some of the faces of the stained glass figures - at the time we had been displaced to Elim Chapel, but he later added photographs from the All Saints’ windows once we had returned to gathering there. Over the ensuing weeks Kevin selected 24 of the photographs and had them printed on small canvases, which would eventually be displayed together on a large framed board, built for us by Ian Mowat.

The display board appeared at the front of the church on Sunday October 13, but with only six of the twenty-four faces on display. Six more were added on October 20, another six on October 27, and then finally on Sunday November 3 - the day we celebrated as the Feast of All Saints’ - all twenty-four faces filled the display. The gradual building of the art project was a striking way to invite us all to remember that we are numbered amongst God’s saints. That evening in his sermon, Jamie Howison offered the following words:

Tonight we are marking the Feast of All Saints’, a day set aside to remember and celebrate the lives of those who have gone before us. And just who are the saints? Biblically, the saints—in Greek hagios or “holy ones”—are those who follow Jesus, including both the living and those who have died. And so in his greetings at the beginning of the Epistle to the Romans, Paul can write, “To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints,” (Romans 1:7), and then later in that same epistle write of the need to contribute to “the poor among the saints at Jerusalem” (15:26). Kevin Grummett’s photographic piece speaks to this, with those tiles including both faces of stained-glass saints along with our faces. We are “called to be saints” in Paul’s language, or maybe called to be numbered by God amongst the saints, in spite of the sometimes unsaintly character of our lives. Sunday by Sunday we are claimed as God’s “holy people” in the eucharistic prayer, and maybe some Sundays you stop and think, “who me?”

Yes, me! And yes, all of us.

Thanks to Kevin for his work on this project, and for all of the other photographs he has added to our website.