“A sword shall pierce through thy own soul also.” Luke 2.35
I sometimes used to sit in church after the last 7pm Sunday mass at St Mary’s, when the lights were out , the doors locked, but the votive candles were still alight at all the shrines around the church.
There is quietness and the strange beauty which flickering candlelight brings to a house of prayer; the lingering smell of incense, the aroma of God; dark, cavernous shadows and pools of golden light.
It is a beauty that is concealed in the shadowless brightness of the halogen bulb; the full glare of day.
I’m with Gerard Manley Hopkins:
“Glory be to God for dappled things—Life only holds its interest because of the shadows, because it is bittersweet: from the pain of bringing a child into the world who then brings such joy; to the pain of passing through death and into eternal felicity.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.”
And yet as humans we cannot but long for sweetness without bitterness, knowing that even if it were possible it would be dull.
Mary’s life was certainly bittersweet. All the confusion and shame of the conception, the agony of labour, the long uncomfortable journey, the indignity of the stable - all is past.
Now she brings her pride and joy, this six week old baby boy, to be presented in the Temple in Jerusalem: the first fruit of her womb to be dedicated to God.
Both she and the baby God are ritually unclean through childbirth. They must offer the two pigeons as a sin offering and a redemption price, for the firstborn belongs to the Lord and must be redeemed.
These are the dual aspects of this Feast, as Bishop Cosin acknowledges in the 1662 Prayer Book which he entitles: “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called, The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin.”
It was primarily a Feast of Our Lord, rather than of his Mother, as the ancient collect I sang earlier, taken from the 7thC Gregorian Sacramentary, makes plain.
And the blessing of candles? Well this was probably another example of the early Christian cross-cultural trick. Take a pagan festival, to do with flames and torches, and chasing away the darkness of winter, and baptize it; Christianize it!
So because Christ is the Light to lighten the gentiles, we bless all the candles we will use in the coming liturgical year.
And like our pagan ancestors, we process with our torches and candles, putting to flight the steel grey skies of winter, and never mentioning the pagan feast of Imbolc & Oimelc which we have displaced.
While we are at it, let’s make St Blaise (February 3rd) the patron saint of Ear, Nose and Throat, and bless parishioners’ throats with the newly blessed candles to protect them from all the colds and 'flus so prevalent at this time of the year.
Of course our American cousins are busy doing the cross-cultural trick backwards. So Candlemas, a Christian feast, becomes the much more politically correct, Groundhog Day, based on an old Scottish couplet:
"If Candlemas Day is bright and clear,A sunny Candlemas means the severity of winter will continue – the groundhog will return to its sleep. But if it is dull and overcast, the worst of winter is past.
there'll be twa winters in the year."
Candlemas is also a pivotal day in the Christian calendar. It is bittersweet, as we look back on the joy of Christmas and Epiphany, as Simeon and Anna rejoice in the Temple; and yet we look forward towards Lent and Passiontide: the agonies of our Lord’s pierced Body; the anguish of our Lady’s pierced soul.
In some of the older rites, where the blessing of candles took place after mass, the white and gold vestments of the mass were exchanged for penitential purple for the procession of lights.
Candlemas reminds us of Life as we Know It, dappled and pied with pain. Who has not watched children grow into adults and not known the bittersweetness of parenthood?
Who has not loved deeply and not known the bittersweet wounds of affection?
The joyful comfort of lovers, friends and family is always eventually plundered by death and grief.
And with all our conviviality and social pleasures, who has not sat down and felt so alone, and, but precariously, loved?
We should be optimistic about ourselves and about our world, while knowing that we are constantly nagged by intimations of despair.
As Hazlitt put it: “Man is the only species who can laugh or cry because he is the only being who knows the difference between what is and what should be.”
We can long for peace and yet stand looking year after year at war and violence.
We can reach for the stars and in minutes be only too aware of our human mortality and of the contingency of all things.
But, the Light shines in the darkness: that spark of hope which God implants within all of us.
We were hardly aware of it in the full blaze of day, in the sweetness of life, but in the gloom and we can see the beckoning light of Christ. Or to use CS Lewis’s metaphor, ‘God whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain.’
As Christians we believe that the Light is Christ. The bright radiance of candles around the altar draw us to him, the source of all light, our comfort and joy.
At the altar we see the bittersweet man of sorrows who has been through what we go through, as the writer to the Hebrews reminds us in today’s epistle: like us; tested like us. Here at the altar he is crucified and yet exalted; the Lamb that was slain who yet lives.
And we live this strange but alluring bittersweet life in the light of glory, and in the presence of Christ.
John Donne lived his life to the full, and knew pain and pleasure, shame and holy exultation. His vision of heaven was of a state of being where these two sides of human life and human nature would be miraculously transformed into the equanimity of Christ our Lord; perfect composure.
So he prayed:
Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven, to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity; in the habitations of thy glory and dominion...And with this confidence in the Gospel, as we celebrate this Candlemas, we shall not fear, even if
“A sword shall pierce through (our) own soul also.” Luke 2.35
