CHRISTMAS begins with a helpless child, utterly dependent for food and heat on his mother. Forty days of festival later, the season ends with that child within the arms of an old man, righteous and devout, filled with wisdom, who has lived his life in the sunshine of the promise that before death he should see the Lord’s Anointed One (because 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 (didn’t Karl Barth say that when the angels played music en famille they played Mozart, but once 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 even have taken the Saviour, the hope of the devout,
Into my longing arms.)
This is one other epiphany. Simeon is prepared ultimately for his dust to return to the earth because 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 reality that this child shall be “the falling and rising of many in Israel, an indication that shall be spoken against”; and that Mary must watch, helpless, within the travails to return. For, after the pain and joy of her son’s birth, Mary now begins (as all moms must) to tread the trail of getting pledged an element of herself to the unknowable way forward for a toddler — a toddler who’s the fabric fruit of a bewildering promise. For there was never a toddler 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 yr, to what Simeon glimpsed, and Mary Magdalene knew within the garden. How clever was the Church, in 336, to repair the nativity in December, the deep midnight of the yr (on this planet because it was known then)!
At this time, the Roman festival of Saturnalia (just 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 final word topsy-turvydom, holding out a promise for the longer term 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 latest wines of autumn. And it’s 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 about, with equal wisdom, at Candlemas, the tip of the 40 days when, in Jewish law, a newly delivered mother was ritually purified. For, by February, within the agrarian economy that dominated everyone’s life until so recently, the cabinets were bare, supplies were low, and an extended, cold spring could mean children crying of hunger, and cattle so weak they’d to be carried out to the fields.
A festival as a reminder of the enjoyment and the promise that might be manifested at Easter was a clever idea within the run-up to the not at all times voluntary rigours of Lent.
WHEN I used to be a toddler 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 throughout Europe, “If at Candlemas you see the sun, winter’s worst is yet to return” — originally a rough guide to what you may hope to get done on the land.
But, once, people made far more of the feast than they do even now, when in recent a long time 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 best 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 run, and the people dismissed.”
For centuries, Christian communities took candles that they might use in the approaching months to their church to be blessed as symbols of Jesus, light of the world — to mark each this festival and, in dark, late winter, the rumour of the sun’s return to warm the cold earth.
FOR guarantees are kept — but perhaps never when, or how, we expect. Simeon and Anna, worshipping within the Temple over long years, are alive to the unexpectedness of God’s windfall. The lamps should be kept trimmed, the candles ready against the Bridegroom’s advent. Did Simeon expect to carry “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 ready. Promise is fulfilled: here is the need of countries, the creating wisdom, the foundation of Jesse, bursting with latest life in latest spring. But there’s an extended technique to go, through pain and wounding, past a tree set on a hill.
So, at Candlemas, we honour not only Mary, but additionally those that have stood in patient trust and waited — and wait — so steadfastly, through all sorrow, through all of the dark years, trusting against all odds that the promise of sunshine returning shall be kept. Just as Hannah presenting her child within 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.
