ROLL on, Low Sunday! I was always told that the First Sunday after Easter was so called because, inevitably, attendance was low, especially in comparison with the much higher attendance on Easter Day itself. Even some of those who attend regularly join with the once-a-year Easter communicants in giving themselves a day off.

After I had been ordained for a while, I began to wonder whether it wasn’t also Low Sunday because the clergy, after all their heroic feats of Holy Week, with services almost every day, school assemblies, Easter home communions, extra children’s events, et al., are still in post-Easter recovery mode, and so everything on the following Sunday is a little bit subfusc, a little bit low-key.

And there’s something to be said for that. We cannot live on the heights all the time, and nor should we be expected to. We are biological as well as spiritual creatures, and both body and mind have, and should be allowed to have, their natural rhythms and alternations of tension and release, high and low. As anyone who has had a houseful of children hyped-up on Easter eggs will know, a little bit of calm and quiet afterwards is more than welcome.

Perhaps churches should make something of this, and have special Low Sunday services, modelled on the excellent example of the growing number of “Blue Christmas” or “Longest Night” services, designed to give a faithful and prayerful expression for those who, because of bereavement or for other reasons, find the intense jollification and emphasis on family get-together in that season painful as well as joyful.

“Longest Night’ has been adopted as a title for some of these services, because the “Blue Christmas” services, which started in the United States, had rather too strong an Elvis association for some Anglicans (as the Cof E’s own web page on these services helpfully explains), although, if I were doing an Easter equivalent of these services, with space and liturgy for those who are feeling low on Low Sunday, I might still be tempted to borrow the title of an American song and call them “Sunday Morning Coming Down”.

None of this, of course, in anyway denies the deep joy of Easter and the glorious news of resurrection. Theologically and spiritually, there is no low Sunday. On the contrary, Easter Day is really just lighting the blue touch paper on the joyful rocket of resurrection, the 40-day Easter season that will culminate in Ascension Day, and then come down in a shower of glorious sparks — tongues of flame at Pentecost — to ignite our inner fireworks and send us out into the world to kindle hearts for Christ.

I also like the other names that different branches of the Church have given this day: “White Sunday”, in the early Roman Missal; “Thomas Sunday” for the Orthodox, because it is the day on which Thomas was invited to touch and search the wounds of Christ. In fact, if I were devising a Low Sunday service, I would keep the Thomas reading; for the fact that Christ rose with the scars of his Passion now made glorious — that they weren’t simply ignored or wiped away, but became part of his risen glory — that fact is the best news of all to those who are suffering now. Even these present pains will be transfigured, and all that we are suffering now will be part of the glory of our risen life, of the “human being fully alive” that God intends us to become.