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We let our alleluias rise on Easter Day. But, to borrow a question I asked here a number of years ago, “Did we overdo Holy Week and Easter Day?”

The problem may not be so much that we overdo Holy Week, the Triduum, and the liturgies of Easter Day. We are right to bring our best to those services and to celebrate them in their fullness.

I have had this deep uneasiness with how we celebrate Eastertide for many years now, and it’s not going away. If anything, it’s getting worse. How are we to reconcile the hard liturgical work of Holy Week with a rich Paschaltide celebration that continues from the celebration of Easter Day itself?

The answer doesn’t seem to be obvious, but I still think it’s worth stirring up a conversation about it.

It is counterintuitive that we haven’t cracked creative celebrations of Easter. We have done well to enrich Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany with all kinds of “lessons and carols” type services.

But even King’s College, Cambridge, that significant locus of 20th-century liturgical innovation for Christmas, has come up empty for Easter. The televised “Easter from King’s” service, which was a Easter counterpart to its beloved televised Christmas service, has been been abandoned, having last aired in 2023.

And while this is disappointing, it’s not entirely surprising. The King’s model of lessons and carols seems to work well for Christmas, but it never really spoke as coherently at Easter. And it is notable that that service took as its starting point not the Resurrection, but the Passion. Perhaps this is the problem in a nutshell: we easily gravitate toward the darkness of the Passion, especially as a contrast with the light of the Resurrection. But how is it that the Church draws out of itself a rich devotional life surrounding the Easter reality?

There have to be new ways to do this in the church. Don’t there?

“We should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways: in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts, anything that comes to mind. This is our greatest festival. Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don’t have a New Testament; you don’t have a Christianity… This is our greatest day. We should put the flags out.”

N. T. Wright

Maybe the “special liturgy” model is the wrong one, and as N. T. Wright suggests, we need to be relying on other artistic modalities.

But I still wonder if there are threads of Anglican patrimony that have not been widely encountered at Easter.

Great Paschal Vespers is a short, stational monastic service that has been disseminated in the Episcopal Church through The Prayer Book Office compiled by Howard Galley in 1980. (Read it here or here.) This service may not be a natural fit in every place, but I for one am eager to see it more widely used and its form adapted in different ways.

Stations of the Resurrection (also known as the Via Lucis, or the Way of Light) is an Eastertide counterpart to Stations of the Cross. It is now included in Common Worship , the official liturgical resource in the Church of England. For parishes that offer one or more Stations of the Cross services before Easter, would it not be wise to provide this service at least once in Eastertide?

And let’s not limit ourselves to thought about “extra” devotional services either. Surely the faithful can be brought more deeply into the Easter season with the right touches in the principal liturgy as well.

I have been struck recently by how the simple placement of the paschal candle in the center of the choir can redefine the season visually. In too many places, the paschal candle is nearly invisible, even when lit. A small flame at the top of a candle that remains unlit most of the year doesn’t nearly make impression we think it does. It’s easy to move the Paschal candle to a more prominent location. So let's do it! If it's a bit “in the way,” that's even better! The asperges, a traditional part of the liturgy in this season, can be used as an opening of the Eucharistic rite to great effect.

Stations of the Resurrection, mentioned above, naturally leads us to a consideration of Ascension Day. It is a significant imbalance in our liturgical life that Ash Wednesday enjoys greater observance among the faithful than Ascension Day does. Both are mid-week liturgies. If people can come out on a Wednesday for ashes, surely they can come out on a Thursday for a principal feast of the church. Is Ascension Day not more fun than Ash Wednesday? Can it really be impossible to convince Episcopalians of this?

The answer, at the moment, perhaps is yes. And this problem deserves some reflection too. Have we developed into liturgical introverts who enjoy the darkness of death, but are too afraid to enter into the light and see what it illuminates?

The hymn “Lift your voice rejoicing, Mary” speaks to all of us with its refrain: “Let your alleluias rise.” I hear this now as a charge to the Church to give the Easter season greater richness and devotional texture. The Episcopal/Anglican Church has done this successfully for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. But if Easter truly is our greatest day and season and very reason for existence, we owe it to ourselves to find new ways to celebrate the risen Christ in Easter.

Labels: Easter, Great Paschal Vespers, King's College (Cambridge), Lessons and Carols, Stations of the Resurrection