Dispatches From Dean Dane

While Eastertide itself is a fifty-day season of rejoicing in the resurrection, this week following Easter Sunday is a special time of celebration. Though most parishes and clergy are pretty weary after all of the magnificent, meaningful liturgies of Holy Week, the Prayer Book gives special attention to the observance of these days, with collects and readings for each one. This reminds us that while we are rightly moved by our Lord’s passion and death, it is the announcement of his resurrection that gives us hope and meaning in our lives. Because he lives, we live as his people, both now in this moment and in the life of the world to come.

This particular Easter Week has been made especially poignant by news of the death on Easter Monday of Francis, the Bishop of Rome. While Anglicans do not acknowledge the authority of the pope in the affairs of our Communion, we do recognize the important role that the papacy plays in representing Christ to the wider world and in speaking Good News to and for the whole Church, Roman or otherwise. Pope Francis’s humility, gentleness, and compassion modeled Christian discipleship and leadership for all of us. May he rest in peace.

Our brothers and sisters in the Eastern Orthodox Church call this “Bright Week.” To spread some brightness, for my Dispatch today I’d like to share two poems and a hymn text that reflect the glory of Christ’s resurrection and its meaning for us.

The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Easter, by George Herbert

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
            Without delays,
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 cross 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 music 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 flower 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 Sun arising in the East,
Though he give light, and th’ East perfume;
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many suns to shine endeavor?
We count three hundred, but we miss,
There is but one, and that one ever.

Resurrection, imperfect., by John Donne

Sleep, sleep old Sun, thou canst not have repast
As yet, the wound thou took’st on friday last;
Sleepe then, and rest; The world may beare thy stay,
A better Sun rose before thee today,
Who, not content to’enlighten all that dwell
On the earths face, as thou, enlightened hell,
And made the darke fires languish in that vale,
As, at thy presence here, our fires grow pale.
Whose body having walk’d on earth, and now
Hasting to Heaven, would, that he might allow
Himselfe unto all stations, and fill all,
For these three daies become a minerall;
Hee was all gold when he lay downe, but rose
All tincture, and doth not alone dispose
Leaden and iron wills to good, but is
Of power to make even sinfull flesh like his.
Had one of those, whose credulous pietie
Thought, that a Soule one might discerne and see
Goe from a body, ‘at this sepulcher been,
And, issuing from the sheet, this body seen,
He would have justly thought this body a soule,
If, not of any man, yet of the whole.
            Desunt caetara. [Latin for “The rest is lacking.”]

“Come, ye faithful, raise the strain” by John of Damascus, translated by John Mason Neale

Come, ye faithful, raise the strain of triumphant gladness!
God hath brought his Israel into joy from sadness:
loosed from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke Jacob’s sons and daughters,
led them with unmoistened foot through the Red Sea waters.

‘Tis the spring of souls today: Christ hath burst his prison,
and from three days’ sleep in death as a sun hath risen;
all the winter of our sins, long and dark, is flying
from his light, to whom we give laud and praise undying.

Now the queen of seasons, bright with the day of splendor,
with the royal feast of feasts, comes its joy to render;
comes to glad Jerusalem, who with true affection
welcomes in unwearied strains Jesus’ resurrection.

Neither might the gates of death, nor the tomb’s dark portal,
nor the watchers, nor the seal hold thee as a mortal:
but today amidst thine own thou didst stand, bestowing
that thy peace which evermore passeth human knowing.