Every week we can see the progress our new neighbor is making. The fact that we have to abandon the high altar for a few weeks is actually a very good sign–the project is really coming along. In fact, the whole situation I find actually enjoyable.
I have experience. The Cathedral where I was long ago closed for a whole summer. The whole space was undergoing restoration, so we had to evacuate. Now it so happened that, just around the corner, was the College of Surgeons Hall. It was just the right size to accommodate the Cathedral congregation. And it also happened that our Warden at the time was the president of the AMA. So, we found ourselves making the trek around the block early every Sunday morning for four months.
Naturally, we took only what we needed. How do you know what you actually need for the Holy Eucharist? Simply check the rubrics, those passages in tiny print that give you instructions about how to perform the various services and who does what and what you need to do them. You might be surprised at how little we actually need to celebrate the Mass. A clean white cloth, wine, bread, water, Bible, and Prayer Books. That is all. They fit very nicely into a briefcase–as we of course discovered.
But we added one more thing. Something that the BCP does not mention, still, we felt we needed. That was Candles. The rubrics don’t mention candles for weekly Eucharist, only for Baptisms and for the Great Vigil. But we packed them anyway, and every Sunday the College of Surgeons resounded with a capella singing by candlelight.
Why? Obviously we didn’t think the College of Surgeons had no electricity. But neither were we just thinking, as many people probably think, that candles are nice decorations. We intuited something much more serious about candles. We were somehow saying that candles really have something to do with our faith. What?
1. First of all, candles really are lovely things. Everybody knows that candles have more beauty than their modern replacements. You don’t have a romantic dinner by light bulb; you do not light a birthday cake with a searchlight; and you do not hand the family of the newly Baptized a flashlight. For most people, candles are one of the very few things lovely in and of themselves.
And in Christian worship that is not a trivial thing to say. The adage about beauty and skin depth is valid only for faces. We worship of the Lord in the Beauty of holiness-and we hope that that beauty is deep indeed. Beauty in worship is not superficial, it should be taken very seriously.
So when we had to make our weekly slog from our Cathedral Church we couldn’t transport many of the things that normally define beauty of holiness. The windows, the organ, the altar, the mosaics, the crosses–all these had to stay behind. Some of them were in fact the things being restored. Candles we could carry. So those candles became a kind of shorthand beauty
2. But Candles do more in worship than add beauty. Candles are also Catalysts for prayer. Very effective catalysts. Just having them on hand, just carrying them in procession or fixing them at the lectern helps us focus, shut out that mental white noise that gets between us and God. I’ve known many people who find that simply gazing at a candle is all they need to do to enter into meditative mind. Candles make anyplace look somehow spiritual, and it’s not just that everybody associates candles with Church. That’s quite true but there is more involved than that. On the Cloisters tour which I plug now, we see how the architecture of the building is designed to serve as a catalyst for meditation. Candles are inexpensive, portable, user-friendly catalysts. Meditation-friendly. Prayer-friendly.
3. Friendly in fact in an even deeper sense than that. Deep down, I believe, there is something very fundamentally human about candles. They are the basic unit of light in darkness–which is why luminousness is measured in candles. For ages, candles were what lit up the dark. I think we all know that somehow. When we see a candle, we feel not only joy not only focus; we feel relief. And that is very congruent with what we believe about God. There are many ways of understanding the Christian faith. One of the oldest and best is simply what we heard on the morning of the first festival of light, the opening of John’s Gospel: a light in the darkness that the darkness cannot comprehend. I have no doubt that what John the Divine had in mind was a candle. St. Vincent of Lerins defined real catholicity as whatever has been done always, and everywhere, and by everyone. Candles are like that. As far as I can judge, candles are used by all people everywhere, throughout the world, and since the beginning of the human race. Candles are truly catholic things in the best sense of that very solid word.
All this is, of course, why we bless them today. But because this is serious, let’s make certain we understand what we mean by that. Let’s think about that word, that verb, Bless. It’s one of those words in worship we have used so often they have gone out of focus. We more-or-less know what they mean. But not quite exactly. What are we doing when we bless candles? Usually we think of “blessing” as something like the religious equivalent of I wish you well, here’s to a happy future. Or we may mean it more seriously, as when we bless a marriage–there we mean we really do invoke the spirit of the Lord upon the people. But obviously we aren’t wishing the candles good luck with God. What we truly are doing is dedicating them today. Setting them aside, saying these candles are sacred for a special purpose.
The Church in the early middle ages, a great creative age, intuited that today was the day most suitable for doing that. The perfect moment to dedicate candles. So we do what we do on solemn days–the great once-a-year events. We enact. We process, recalling the Holy family’s journey to the Temple. And like the Holy family, we dedicate. In more ways than one.
1. First there’s that other name for this feast many of you will remember from childhood (I hope). The Purification. We don’t cancel that either; it’s part of what we celebrate this day. Now what happens is that Mary – is in fact re-dedicated. The Law Torah says that the male child is circumcised on the 8th day and that the mother 33 days after that must attend the Temple for purification. This troubled me–it sounded like it meant birth had fouled the person. But that can’t be right. Childbirth was so awesome, so mysterious, so obviously miraculous, something had to be done about it. It had to alter the woman who goes through it. Blood was life; it was the opposite of tainted stuff. But when blood was shed life ebbed out, and the person needed to get back in contact with God, the source of life. A kind of dedication.
2. Now there’s another name a very small number of you will know this feast by but which will be new to most others: The Meeting. The Meeting of Simeon and Jesus–that is, the meeting of the Old Covenant and the New. This is what the Orthodox Church calls today’s festival. This moment in the Temple is the moment when the Old and the New Covenants meet. The new testament fulfills the old, the Greek scriptures validate the Hebrew. But how much better Luke expresses it in his usual Gospel poetry: the old prophet Simeon takes the new prophet Jesus in his arms; the Old Testament cradling the New. That’s so good, so much better than either fundamentalists or sceptics have understood the relation between old and New. That is really orthodox, to use another very solid and precise word.
3. But now the day is officially The Presentation. Of course our current Prayer Book has done what it almost always does–returns to the earliest name. But I confess that before I understood that, the change troubled me. The Presentation of Christ, not the Purification, not Candlemass. Some voices when our current calendar was drawn up made some sort of requirement that every commemoration be about the person of Christ. That’s too narrow. Every saint, for example, had to have worked or died for Jesus–that’s why they argued against Thomas Becket for instance since he died merely for the Church. In my understanding one who dies for the Church does indeed die for Christ. You see the absurdity. I think Duke Ellington and T. S. Eliot belong on our calendar, and neither man died for Christ. But both lived for him, and worshiped him in the beauty of holiness. I wish we had more feasts of the Holy Spirit, more for the Virgin Mary. I’m sure Christ would approve.
But I have come to agree. At the deepest level, the most staggering reality we celebrate today is the Presentation of Jesus. I only wish we had labeled it instead, “The Dedication.” For this really is our feast of the dedication. Judaism has its dedication: the purifying of the Temple after the Gentiles had defiled it. This is ours. Today not only is the Blessed Virgin rededicated to God. Not only is the new covenant, handed into the arms of the old. The 6 week old Jesus is dedicated to the Father; Christ is presented in the Temple. One of those holy ironies that make our faith strong: the redeemer had to be redeemed. There is a deep, deep tradition, one that goes to the very roots of our faith, that the firstborn creature is God’s possession. You must sacrifice your first calves and sheep; you must offer the first fruits of your harvest; and your first-born child is given to the Temple service. But you could redeem the child: you could, that is, offer something else of value, to redeem him or her from God. The one God presented to us had to be presented back to God. It’s the festival of the redeeming of the Redeemer. That is the kind of holy paradox that lives in the vital center of real Christianity.
Last Sunday in anticipation of this Sunday, Bp Andrew told us that this would be the last of the three great festivals of light. Suppose you had no idea what he meant, it still would be something you would want to see, wouldn’t it? A Festival of Light sounds good, doesn’t it? Sounds lovely.
But of course we do know what it means. It is one of those occasions so heavy with meaning it commemorates several things: Mary’s purification, fulfilling the old Torah to the dot. The nexus of the Old and New Testaments, each validating the other. The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, offering back to God the Son God offered to humankind. As always, we know it’s not nearly enough merely to say those things; we re-enact, we discover the sacrament–so we do our own act of solemn dedication and bless our candles for the new year.
And one more thing. Candles, the blessed Virgin, the meeting of the covenants, the dedication of Jesus: all these are sources of light. Light is something we crave at this moment. I’m afraid our century has opened onto some ominous darkness. We hear today the most lovely song, the Song of Simeon: in the etiquette of the soul, he says Lord, let your servant now depart in peace. My eyes have seen the rescue you have sent –to be a light to the nations, and the glory of Israel. That’s what we call the prophetic present. Those who pray the office know it well–for we say it every single day when the sun goes down. And we follow it with that daily prayer for light: Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, and of thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.
