As a small child, I thought this coming weekend was called by the Church ‘Low Sunday’ because sacristans, choir, priests, (in that order) were lying low in exhaustion after the ceremonies of Holy Week and Easter. Not to mention the nuns who had managed it all.
It was probably a fair assessment.
The choir which carried an ever-greater responsibility then, had been rehearsing since well before Ash Wednesday as the burden of ritual was enormous. Of course, all the hymns were in Latin, but memory easily recalls singing the Popole Meus – Reproaches and the Pange Lingua on Good Friday morning – all unaccompanied of course as no bell could be rung or organ sounded between Holy Thursday morning Mass and Easter Sunday. The Pange Lingua which we sing today during the veneration of the cross was a Sixth Century poem by Fortunatus bishop of Poitiers and was easily singable – probably because the poetic metre was derived from the one used by Roman Legions for their marching songs. The nuns didn’t know that, and neither, I suspect, did the priests. (Choirs today certainly don’t. They usually sing it like a dirge on the premise that slower music is usually more sacred.) Finally, school boarders went home for Easter only after the 3.00 pm Stations of the Cross on Good Friday afternoon. At which point the religious must have let out a sigh of relief; now they had only the Resurrection and their prayers to think about. They hadn’t slept since the previous morning when they rose at 5.00 am; all Holy Thursday night had been wakeful, nuns and senior students took it in turns hour and hour about, to keep vigil at the Altar of Repose, recalling Christ and the sleeping apostles at Gethsemane “could you not watch one hour with Me”?
So we did.
Nobody actually knows where the name Low Sunday came from, but it is certainly a contrast with Easter day; it was the day when, according to St Augustine, those newly baptised a week earlier stopped wearing their white robes.
The day had several other names as well. It was known officially as the Mass “Quasi modo geniti infantes“ which translates “As newborn babies”, which sounds odd for a formal title, but makes sense. Today we catalogue a book or document according to its author and then its title, but most early documents are anonymous and didn’t have titles. What was used to distinguish each one from another were the first three or four words of the document – any document important or small – and as such they were filed in ancient collections from Sumerian clay tablets to medieval parchment maps, from trivial tax reports to crucial legal records. And so Masses were listed according to the first few words of the particular opening prayer of the day, the Introit. And Quasi modo were the first words of the Introit for Low Sunday.
Of course the words sound familiar. Quasimodo was the name of the fictional Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo’s narrative where the ill-formed infant is found abandoned in the great cathedral on the Sunday after Easter and is called by the day’s name. Of course he grows up as the Cathedral bell-ringer, deaf from his calling and hopelessly in love with the fictional heroine. The novel swept France in a way hard to imagine now, and although the churchmen were its villains, the decaying cathedral building in a Gothic style that was then rather despised, suddenly became central to Paris’s and thus France’s soul and identity. A massive effort was made to restore the crumbling fabric, and it was said that Hugo and Quasimodo together had saved Notre Dame. Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration was sometimes more imagined than restoring, but the final decorations became so loved that, after the fairly recent great fire, the building was returned to the latter’s work.
The other name for today is Doubting Thomas’s Sunday after the gospel of the day. St Thomas is one of the most vivid and appealing of the apostles who is named in the three earlier gospels but comes alive in Saint John’s. In this account, towards the end of Jesus’s life the group know that the further they are from Jerusalem the safer they are; then a message comes from the sisters of the dying Lazarus asking urgently for help. Their home in Bethany is only a few kilometres from the holy city, and going there will be stepping into danger; it is Thomas who rallies them “let us go that we may die with him”. The words leave a bitter taste in the mouth; we know full well that when it comes to soldiers arresting him, the twelve will flee into the night. But before Gethsemane is the extraordinary Johannine discourse of the Last Supper heavy with a sense of departure and loss. “You know the way where I am going…” Thomas cuts across him, vivid and down to earth “Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” The answer is one of the great statements of the gospel “I am the way, the truth and the life”.
Later, on Sunday, the disciples have found the empty tomb and Mary Magdalene has seen her gardener. They are all gathered in a locked room in fear when Jesus appears to them. Thomas of course is missing, and is dismissive of their news when he sees them. “Unless I … place my finger in the mark of the nails … I will not believe.” Eight days later when Thomas is actually with them, today’s gospel tells of Christ’s appearing again and to Thomas “Put your finger here, and see my hands …” Caravaggio’s extraordinary painting – vivid and deliberately confronting – has confounded our memories, because in fact Thomas’s response is not that of touching. He does not move. His response twins that earlier exchange and is another of the great statements of any gospel.
“My Lord and my God.”
At the risk of repeating something written earlier: traditionally Thomas brought the gospel to India. Furthermore, an apocryphal tradition has Mary the mother of Jesus living on in the house of the Beloved Disciple until Gabriel once again appeared, this time to warn her that she had three days to live. This time her joy was undiluted; the news spread like wildfire and miraculously the apostles came from everywhere, Peter from Rome, Bartholomew from Armenia, James Spain etc., but Thomas having to travel from India was once again late and arrived at Mary’s tomb in Gethsemane some time after her burial, but just in time to meet her bodily self as she was leaving to join her son in Heaven. As proof of their meeting she gave him her girdle (cincture), and this time it was Thomas who could convince the others of her assumption.
The girdle is held in a monastery on Mount Athos to this day.
Image 1: Franciscan nuns in a choir stall, depicted in a 15th-century French manuscript© British Library (Cotton Domitian A XVII fol 74v) In the public domain.
Image 2: Chapel Interior
Image 3: Gargoyles and grotesques on Notre Dame Cathedral. GetYourGuide.com
Image 4: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio; in the Sanssouci Picture Gallery, Potsdam, Germany. Public domain.
Image 5: Icon depiction the giving of the girdle to St Thomas the Apostle. Below is a stylised representation of Mary’s Tomb, with flowers lying in the sarcophagus. Public domain – by AlexEleon, Wikimedia.org
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