KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 29 January
A light to lighten the Gentiles
Light is such a powerful and important religious and philosophical image and one which pervades even our secular culture in its exuberances and its despair. Candlemas is the popular name for a very complex story and set of feasts that belong to early February in the life of the Christian Church. Candlemas – a mass of candles – belongs to the Feast of the Presentation of Christ and the Purification of Mary. A double-barrelled feast, it speaks to the deeper meaning of our humanity in union with God. It marks the transition from light to life, from the light of Christmas to the life of Easter, to the overcoming of darkness and its parallel in the conquering of death.
Candlemas marks the first time that Christ comes to Jerusalem. It happens forty days after his birth, in the constructed time sequences of the Church, and so is celebrated now on February 2nd. No mention of groundhogs, I am afraid! It also marks, in the Jewish custom, the purification of the mother forty days after child-birth. There is something quite profound in these traditions: the one honouring God for the birth of a child; the other, recognizing the uncertainties and wonder of child-birth itself. In the classical Anglican understanding, for instance, the latter sensibility contributes to a special liturgy known as “The Churching of Women,” a service of “Thanksgiving after Child-Birth,” which also includes a prayer for the loss of a child in child-birth. Joy and sorrow are powerfully intermingled. Pretty powerful stuff about the realities of human experience and expectation. It is a wisdom we would do well to ponder.
