Sacred Sunday: A 162-Year-Old Hymn About Saints Already at Rest, Plus Three Songs From People Still Very Much in the Race

What Sacred Sunday Is

Every Sunday, Song Reviews takes sacred music seriously enough to actually criticize it – what the music does, where it came from, and whether it earns the reaction it asks for, the same way any other day’s coverage works. It isn’t a tribute day. Every entry carries a real score.

What We’re Covering Today

Today is All Saints’ Day, and this week’s lineup is built around it directly rather than around a coincidental hymn pick.

The Hymn

William Walsham How’s 1864 text “For All the Saints,” almost always sung to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ 1906 tune “Sine Nomine” – written specifically for this exact day on the church calendar:

• Wells Cathedral Choir – 8.3/10. From Malcolm Archer’s 1999 Hyperion recording, Sine Nomine in its original, purpose-built setting.
• Indelible Grace – 7.2/10. A 2003 folk-hymn alternative that discards Vaughan Williams’ tune entirely for a new, smaller melody.
• Fernando Ortega – 7.9/10. A 2024 piano-and-voice reading that keeps Sine Nomine intact but shrinks it to one unhurried room.

New Religious Songs

• Phil Wickham – “Song of the Saints” – 7.7/10. A modern creed song about belonging to an entire lineage of believers, not just one’s own present-tense faith.
• Anne Wilson – “Carry Me” – 7.8/10. A plea for help bearing a childhood surrendered at 15, from inside labor that hasn’t ended.
• Katy Nichole – “When I Fall” – 7.5/10. A viral hit that treats failure as where the prayer starts, not what it overcomes.

What Connects Them

“For All the Saints” pictures the faithful as a finished story: an unbroken “cloud of witnesses,” drawn from Hebrews 12, already arrived at rest, their labors behind them. That’s the version of sainthood All Saints’ Day exists to honor, and all three recordings reviewed today – whether at Wells Cathedral’s full scale, Indelible Grace’s folk intimacy, or Ortega’s single room – are honoring exactly that: people whose race is over.

The three new songs are doing something closer to the opposite, and reading them next to the hymn rather than on their own sharpens what each one is actually saying. Phil Wickham’s “Song of the Saints” is the most direct bridge between the two registers – an explicit modern attempt at the same “communion of believers across history” idea How’s text is built on, reaching for the hymn’s scale even if it doesn’t yet carry the hymn’s structural weight. Anne Wilson’s “Carry Me” and Katy Nichole’s “When I Fall” both pull further away from the hymn’s finished-rest framing and toward something more honest about the middle of the race: Wilson, asking to be carried through an adulthood she inherited at 15 before she was done being a child; Nichole, locating the actual starting point of her prayer in failure rather than overcoming it. Neither song claims the saints’ rest the hymn describes – both are explicit about not having gotten there yet.

Put together, the four songs make the same argument from opposite ends: the “great cloud of witnesses” the hymn celebrates was, at some point, exactly as exhausted and unfinished as Wilson’s and Nichole’s songs describe, before any of them reached the rest How’s text pictures. All Saints’ Day is usually observed by looking backward at who’s already arrived. This week’s three new songs are a useful corrective, insisting on what the view looks like from in the middle of the labor, still a long way from any rest at all.

Hero image: “For All the Saints” stained glass window, All Saints Episcopal Church, Jensen Beach, Florida, by Stephen B Calvert, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.