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Faith: Still light in the darkness

31 January 2025

Charles Moseley celebrates Candlemas and Simeon’s joy

Alamy

Presentation of Jesus in the Temple (1576) by Domenico Carnevali (1524-79)

CHRISTMAS begins with a helpless child, utterly dependent for food and warmth on his mother. Forty days of festival later, the season ends with that child in the arms of an old man, righteous and devout, full of wisdom, who has lived his life in the light of the promise that before death he should see the Lord’s Anointed One (as the Greek has it).

He takes the speechless Word in his arms, as Mary took the Word into her body, and overflows with the overwhelming joy that I cannot glimpse without hearing Bach in my head (did not Karl Barth say that when the angels played music en famille they played Mozart, but when they played for God they played Bach?):

 

Ich habe genug,

Ich habe den Heiland, das Hoffen der Frommen,
Auf meine begierigen Arme genommen.

(It is enough. I have taken the Saviour, the hope of the devout,
Into my longing arms.)

 

This is another epiphany. Simeon is ready at last for his dust to return to the earth as it was, and his spirit to God who gave it. It is for this moment that his whole life has been preparing.

But he glimpses the truth that this child will be “the falling and rising of many in Israel, a sign that will be spoken against”; and that Mary must watch, helpless, in the travails to come. For, after the pain and joy of her son’s birth, Mary now begins (as all mothers must) to tread the path of having pledged a part of herself to the unknowable future of a child — a child who is the material fruit of a bewildering promise. For there was never a child like this; and Simeon knows that “a sword shall pierce [thy] soul also.”

 

LIKE all religions worthy of the name, Christianity takes account of our life in time: a journey through each circling year, to what Simeon glimpsed, and Mary Magdalene knew in the garden. How wise was the Church, in 336, to fix the nativity in December, the deep midnight of the year (in the world as it was known then)!

At this time, the Roman festival of Saturnalia (like the Greek Kronia at harvest time) recalled the Golden Age of Saturn, when, before their Fall, humans knew not the doctrine of ill-doing, and hierarchy was upended. Topsy-turvydom reigned. Christmas is the ultimate topsy-turvydom, holding out a promise for the future far greater than any Greek or Roman junketing in memory of a past.

At the solstice, for the people of the north, the sun begins its return to the fruit- blossom of spring, and the golden fields and new wines of autumn. And it is in dark times that humans need parties, merry meetings, to bring them back to what our species craves: food, warmth, being together, laughter, light, joy.

The Church’s second bracket of this parenthesis of Christmastide is set, with equal wisdom, at Candlemas, the end of the 40 days when, in Jewish law, a newly delivered mother was ritually purified. For, by February, in the agrarian economy that dominated everyone’s life until so recently, the cupboards were bare, supplies were low, and a long, cold spring could mean children crying of hunger, and cattle so weak they had to be carried out to the fields.

A festival as a reminder of the joy and the promise that would be manifested at Easter was a wise idea in the run-up to the not always voluntary rigours of Lent.

 

WHEN I was a child and sang in our church choir, I can’t remember ever noticing Candlemas as a church festival, though I do recall people repeating the old saying, common all over Europe, “If at Candlemas you see the sun, winter’s worst is yet to come” — originally a rough guide to what you might hope to get done on the land.

But, once, people made much more of the feast than they do even now, when in recent decades many ancient observances have quietly re-established themselves. St Bernard of Clairvaux describes (c.1153) processions with candles lit from a blessed fire, exactly as Alcuin of York records 400 years earlier.

The nun Egeria, pilgrim to Jerusalem in about 380, describes Candlemas being celebrated there with “the greatest honour”; and a procession to the Anastasis “with great joy, as at Easter”. Simeon’s words, and an account of Anna’s joy on seeing the Lord, are read, “and when all has been celebrated as customary, the sacrament is administered, and the people dismissed.”

For centuries, Christian communities took candles that they would use in the coming months to their church to be blessed as symbols of Jesus, light of the world — to mark both this festival and, in dark, late winter, the rumour of the sun’s return to warm the cold earth.

 

FOR promises are kept — but perhaps never when, or how, we expect. Simeon and Anna, worshipping in the Temple over long years, are alive to the unexpectedness of God’s providence. The lamps must be kept trimmed, the candles ready against the Bridegroom’s advent. Did Simeon expect to hold “the glory of thy people Israel” as a tiny child, unable to feed itself or move unaided?

Simeon the anointed one could have expected to be a king, like David. But he burst forth in gratitude — literally in a eucharist, or thanksgiving. For him, his cup indeed runneth over; his table is prepared. Promise is fulfilled: here is the desire of nations, the creating wisdom, the root of Jesse, bursting with new life in new spring. But there is a long way to go, through pain and wounding, past a tree set on a hill.

So, at Candlemas, we honour not only Mary, but also those who have stood in patient trust and waited — and wait — so steadfastly, through all sorrow, through all the dark years, trusting against all odds that the promise of light returning will be kept. Just as Hannah presenting her child in the Temple is an act of utter, grateful trust, so what Mary does is a giving to God, in love, of that precious thing that he has given us, against all reasonable expectation.
 

Dr Charles Moseley is a Life Fellow of Hughes Hall, Cambridge.

charlesmoseley.com

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