Dear Friends,
The Second Sunday of Easter is also known as Low Sunday, and from the early days of the Church it has been associated with the full inclusion of those newly baptized at the Easter Vigil into the full worshipping life of the Church. The old introit uses words from the first Letter of Peter – “Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation— if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.” (1 Peter 2:1-3). Those new-born infants (the newly baptized) laid aside their white baptismal garments on this Sunday, hence the origin of the Latin title of Low Sunday, “Dominica in albis depositis” – they took their full place in the assembly, no longer as catechumens but one with the Body of Christ. One of the my favorite office hymns, sung before the Magnificat, refers to this tradition:
In snow-white robes of royal state,
And now, the Red Sea’s channel past,
To Christ our Prince we sing at last.
The Resurrection of Jesus Christ binds the faithful together as one family – as one body in Christ – it is why, even if we have no one to baptize, we still bless water at the Easter Vigil and renew our baptismal covenant together as the Church, the body of Christ. By doing this we attempt to join in the prayer of Jesus to the Father before his betrayal, that his followers be one: “I in them and you in me,” prayed Jesus to his Father, “that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17:20-23)
In a couple of weeks, we will welcome the Choristers of His Majesty’s Chapel Royal to New York – their first ever visit to the United States. They are coming at the tail-end of the Choirmasters’ course to have a kind of ‘boot camp’ with our own choristers. They will sing with them at these services:
Friday, April 19 at 5:30pm
Sunday, April 21 at 11am and 4pm
I hope that you will come and celebrate this historic visit, and support all the choristers.
Your Priest and Pastor,
Carl
“Easter”
by George Herbert
Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delayes,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.
Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art.
The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.
Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
Pleasant and long:
Or, since all musick is but three parts vied
And multiplied,
O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.
I got me flowers to straw thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.
The Sunne arising in the East,
Though he give light, & th’ East perfume;
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.
Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever.
(from ‘The Temple’, 1633)
