May-day and Eastertide festivity

After Easter. Thus does the Prayer Book tradition describe this present time. Contemporary Anglican liturgies reject this. The Sundays in this season are not 'after Easter' but 'of Easter'. While the Prayer Book tradition expresses festivity by means of the Easter Anthems and the proper preface of Easter Day used during the octave, contemporary liturgies seek to maintain the festivity throughout the fifty days from Easter Day to Whitsun.

It sounds like an expansion of festivity: it is, however, a contraction and narrowing of festivity. It is a contraction and narrowing because it limits festivity to the liturgical, instead of liturgy being an expression of a joy that embraces the social and communal. We cannot sustain social and communal festivity for fifty days (and this is true even in the current circumstances of lockdown).

Hooker reminds us that there are three aspects to festivity, "praise, liberality, and rest":

The most natural testimonies of our rejoicings in God are first his praises set forth with cheerful alacrity of mind, secondly our comfort and delight expressed by a charitable largeness of somewhat more than common bounty, thirdly sequestration from ordinary labours, the toils and cares whereof are not meet to be companions of such gladness (LEP V.70.1).

Festivity needs the social and communal alongside the liturgical. It was for this reason that James I's Book of Sports - a key text in the defence of an Anglican tradition of festivity - refuted the suggestion that "no honest mirth or recreation is lawfull or tolerable in Our Religion" by, amongst other things, permitting "having of May-games ... and the setting up May-poles". This points to how, in addition to the Easter octave, we can mark Eastertide with an authentic festivity.

May-day is a natural celebration of approaching summer: the days grow longer and warmer, flowers bloom, rich greenery emerges. That it falls in the midst of this time 'after Easter' - between Easter Day, Ascension Day, and Whitsun - is a wonderful icon of how all things are restored in and through the Resurrection and Ascension of Our Lord.

That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth.

While the tradition of the May-pole may be absent from many of our communities, we can recall how it acts as a sign of the joyous fulfilment of the paschal mystery mirrored in the approach of summer:

they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken.

The traditional May-day festivities, and their celebration of the joys of warmer weather and longer days, offer a more meaningful expression of Eastertide festivity than the artificial attempt in contemporary liturgies to sustain Easter festivity over fifty days. What is more, May-day festivities also offer a richer theological account of Easter joy, for the Easter hope, while having at its centre the liturgical proclamation, must also necessarily be social and communal. If the hope of the Resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting does not abundantly flow over into social and communal rejoicing, the Church miserably fails in its proclamation. The physical and the material must be caught up in the Easter hope if it is not to be degraded into the likeness of Gnostic myth.

Having this time of traditional festivity in the midst of Eastertide - festivity rooted in the joyous affirmation of the created order, the material, the physical - enables the Church to unfold the hope of Easter, Ascension, and Whitsun, of "the glory and honour of the nations" feasting in the civitas Dei, in the cosmic summer "for there shall be no night there", gathered around "the tree of life".

Happy May-day.

Why I support the ordination of women: a High Church reflection

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Pride, progressive sectarianism, and TEC on Facebook

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