KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 5 February
A light to lighten
The transition from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge, is an ancient and universal feature of education, itself a kind of enlightenment. In the fearful confusions of our world and day, we forget about its power and necessity. Yet, it is in our face through the readings in Chapel this week. The reading from the Prophet Malachi, proclaiming the idea of the Lord “whom ye seek” coming “suddenly to his temple,” was poignantly juxtaposed with Luke’s account of Christ’s first coming to the Temple forty days after his birth.
In the Christian understanding, it is a double-barrelled feast, a festival of Mary and a feast of Christ, his presentation – a kind of dedication of the first-born to God – and her purification – a kind of thanksgiving to God for childbirth. Presentation and Purification go together. It concerns how we are prepared for truth, for its presence in our lives. A refiner’s fire and fuller’s soap are Malachi’s images about the refining of metal, on the one hand, and of sheep’s wool, on the other. In the face of the truth of God, all that is not and not of God is stripped bare and made pure. Only as purified can we be awakened to the light that enlightens our humanity, the light which is life.
This week marks an intriguing and important transition, at least for the churches of the Western Christian world. It is the transition, the turning point, from Christmas, the festival of light, to Easter, the festival of life. February 2nd is not so much about groundhogs and their shadows, except to say that without light there can be no shadow. Candlemas, as the Presentation of Christ and the Purification of May is commonly known, marks that transition.
The lessons are wonderful and profound, complex and yet simple. We are called to be light but only in the light of Christ, without which we are really only darkness, indeed darkness upon darkness, abyss upon abyss. “In thy light shall we see light,” as the Psalmist puts it, emphasizing at once the idea that human knowing depends upon God’s knowing and our participation in that knowing.