In praise of Low Sunday
While the BCP 1662 and its variants do not use the term 'Low Sunday', Sparrow's words indicate that this traditional understanding of the First Sunday after Easter shaped the praying of the Prayer Book tradition.
Yes, the First Sunday after Easter. The contemporary insistence that this coming Sunday is the 'Second Sunday of Easter' obscures the fact that Easter Day is the feast of feasts, 'The Day of Resurrection' (John of Damascus). That the Sundays of the season are, in the Prayer Book tradition, 'after Easter' emphasises the unique glory of Easter Day and calls us to be centred around this truth and glory.
There is also theological significance in this. It centres the Church not on the fifty day post-Resurrection experiences of the disciples, but on the reality of the Resurrection on Easter Day, from which these experiences flow. This follows the pattern of the Apostolic witness, in which the reality of the Resurrection - the Paschal Mystery - is followed by the post-Resurrection encounters rather than these themselves being regarded as Easter:
For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;
And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:
And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve:
After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.
After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles.
The paschal season, then, flows from Easter Day. The Church's experience of the Risen Lord is not the Resurrection but the consequence of the Resurrection. It ensures, in other words, that we do not - in the words of Rowan Williams - "reduce the resurrection just to something that was going on inside the heads of the disciples". The centrality of Easter Day proclaims otherwise, "taking completely seriously what the New Testament says about the tomb being empty on Easter Day".
Low Sunday also recognises that the joy of this season echoes but cannot replicate Easter Day. To attempt to maintain that same level of festive joy throughout the fifty days, put simply, does not work. As Hooker reminds us, there are three characteristics of festivity "praise, liberality and rest". He continues:
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).
And so we mark Easter Day and some of the days following with these characteristics - with the high praise of the Easter Day festive Eucharist; with the joy of food; with rest from labour. These characteristics, however, cannot be sustained throughout fifty days. Work resumes, schools re-commence, our diet returns to normal. To pretend that the festival is fifty days long is, then, to undermine the experience and joy of festivity.
The season does echo with Easter joy. Hymnody, Easter Garden, flowers, frontals and vestments should carry this echo throughout the season, and prepare us for its resumption on Ascension Day. Festivity, however, means more in the catholic tradition than liturgical colours and repeated 'Alleluias'. It is, as Hooker states, to be embodied in domestic and communal life through feasting and rest. To banish Low Sunday and maintain a fiction of fifty days festivity is actually to do festivity on the cheap.
Low Sunday, then, closes the Easter octave and our high feasting, and begins five Sundays given over to the living out of the Resurrection. As Sparrow puts it, these Sundays are about "instructing and confirming [us] in the faith of the Resurrection". The traditional collects for these Sundays after Easter unfold this, petitioning in various ways that we will be shaped by the Resurrection celebrated on Easter Day. That these Sundays conclude with Rogation Sunday wonderfully illustrates the ordinary, earthy nature of this vocation to live out the Resurrection.
Let us therefore know the joy of Low Sunday. Not an attempt to sustain the high joy and festivity of Easter Day, but as - to use a term from Sparrow - a "Low Easter", bathing in the reflected light and joy of the Great Festival, and praying that it would fill our daily lives.
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