Showing posts with label candlemas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label candlemas. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 2, 2022

Candlemas 2022

 



You may have missed it but today's Candlemas, the beautiful feast of the church year in which the Old Testament is fulfilled in terms of the New and Christ, the living temple, enters into His earthly facsimile.  It is, when you think on it, a bridge to Easter.

Here's Newman:


The Angel-lights of Christmas morn,

Which shot across the sky,

Away they pass at Candlemas,

They sparkle and they die.


Comfort of earth is brief at best,

Although it be divine;

Like funeral lights for Christmas gone,

Old Simeon's tapers shine.


And then for eight long weeks and more

We wait in twilight grey,

Till the high candle sheds a beam

On Holy Saturday.


We wait along the penance-tide

Of solemn fast and prayer;

While song is hush'd, and lights grow dim

In the sin-laden air.


And while the sword in Mary's soul

Is driven home, we hide

In our own hearts, and count the wounds

Of passion and of pride.


And still, though Candlemas be spent

And Alleluias o'er,

Mary is music in our need,

And Jesus light in store.


Bless you all.


Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος,

LSP

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

The Presentation




LORD, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, * according to thy word.
For mine eyes have seen * thy salvation,
Which thou hast prepared * before the face of all people;
To be a light to lighten the Gentiles, * and to be the glory of thy people Israel.

Gloria Patri...


Happy Candlemas, crew. Hope you're soaring, to the Moon.

HOLD THE LINE,

LSP

++++

Just For Kix:

*Its become something of a tradition at St. xxx to preface the Candlemas sermon with a quotation from one of the English reformers. Last year we heard from the one time Bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, and not wanting to let go of a good thing, we’ll hear from him again tonight. The zealous Bishop is writing to a friend in 1538 concerning a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He states:

“She hath been the devil’s instrument to bring many, I fear, to everlasting fire; now she herself, with her old sister Walsingham, (and) her young sister of Ipswich… would make a jolly muster at Smithfield. They would not be all day burning.” The reforming prelate goes on to refer to an image of Our Lady as, 'That great sybil.'” 

There’s plenty more in a similar vein; listen to a layman this time, John Falkes: “it is a foolish thyng to offer to the Image of our Lady… her head shalbe hoare (bef)or I offer to her, what is it but a blocke? If it could speake to me, I would geue it an halpeny worth of ale.”

Latimer, and people like our friend John were pleased because the great shrine statues of the Virgin Mary in England, which the people had venerated for centuries, were being sent to London to be burned. They were to be destroyed, just like the religious houses which had grown up around them. For Latimer and his friends, many of whom were to become vastly rich through the sale of Church land, this was a good thing. Why?

Sheer, unadulterated, demonic greed aside, they felt the Catholic religion, substance and outward sign, doctrine and popular expression, was so much blasphemous fable. They didn’t believe. For them, the statues of the Saints and the devotion centered on them was a simple matter of idolatry; they detracted from the worship due to Christ alone and were therefore idols, fit to be burned. A fitting punishment for graven images that led men to hell fire itself. 

Well, they were burnt, sometime in 1538, in Chelsea, and Latimer was a happy man. The idols had gone, the chief ones anyway, and so had their Shrines, not least Walsingam. But not all were pleased at the result; here’s another person writing, about a decade after the destruction of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. It’s anonymous and runs thus:

Bitter, bitter oh to behould 
The grasse to growe 
Where the walls of Walsingam 
So stately did shewe. 

Such were the works of Walsingam 
While shee did stand 
Such are the wrackes as now do shewe 
Of that so holy land. 

Levell levell with the ground 
The towres doe lye 
Which with their golden, glitteringe tops pearsed once to the skye.
Where weare gates no gates are nowe, 

The waies unknowen, 
Where the press of peares did passe 
While her fame far was blowen. 

Oules do scrike where the sweetest himnes Lately weer songe, 
Toades and serpents hold their dennes 
Wher the palmers did thronge. 

Weepe, weepe O Walsingam, 
Whose dayes are nightes, 
Blessings turned to blasphemies, 
Holy deeds to dispites.

So who was right, the iconoclasts, or their opposition? The people who destroyed the images and became millioniaires, waxing strong on the despoiling of the Church, or those who stood for the ancient devotion of the land? To put it another way, who was right? Churches like ours or those who scorn us as ignorant idolaters? Obviously, we think we’re in the right, otherwise we wouldn’t be celebrating this Feast of Candlemas, held in honour of the Blessed Virgin and her Son. Even so, we owe it to ourselves and to our opposition, ancient and modern, to clarify our position.

Latimer was wrong, we are not idolaters. When we light a candle at the Walsingham Shrine we are not bowing down to a pagan deity, that “great sybil.” We are not worshipping the Blessed ever virgin Mary as a god, on the contrary, we are asking her to pray for us, because we know that she is alive and in heaven. And just as we ask any holy person alive on earth to intercede on our behalf, so too do we ask the same of those in heaven, especially the  holiest of them all, the great Mother of God, Mary most holy, who brought salvation into the world.

More than this, our outward devotion to the Saints, not least the Virgin, with her shrines, statues and candles, isn’t some unnecessary distraction from the worship due to Christ alone, but flows from it. Good Christians naturally want to celebrate the lives of men and women of outstanding sanctity as these people are heroes of the Faith, demonstrating the redeeming power and love of Christ. They show us that the business of our religion is true, and so we set up representations of them in our churches to lead us to greater devotion to Our Saviour who was glorified in their lives. This isn’t graven idolatry, it is the normal piety of the faithful throughout the ages, of people who love Jesus and therefore love His Saints and most especially His Mother.

We see that here at St. XXXX; Bishop Latimer didn’t, and so he moved with his allies to stamp out such devotion. In doing so he destroyed the popular, natural, faith of the English; its no small wonder, I think, that when the statues of the Saints were taken away, so too was sainthood from the people. And for a fact, an England bereft of its Shrines became in short order the most godless country in Europe. It seems, then, that the final verse of our anonymous defender of Walsingham has a prophetic ring. To return:

What we’re doing tonight, on this Feast, is putting right that wrong. We are returning the Saints to the people so that we, in our turn, may strive to be saints, helped on by their glorious example and aided by their powerful intercession So tonight, as we light candles in honour of Our Lady, may the light of Christ’s love burn brightly in us that we too, with her, may join the heavenly host of souls redeemed by the grace and love of God.

Saturday, February 2, 2019

Candlemas



I'm tempted to reflect on the strange double standards of the age we live in. How it's not OK for Justice Kavanaugh to have an immature excerpt in his high school yearbook but it is OK for Governor Ralph Coonman Northam to go all Grand Wizard in his. 

Weirder still, it's apparently terrible to separate children from their parents at the border but it's a triumph to separate them from their lives at the moment of birth. Surely no one's benefiting from the sale of body parts. That's all too unthinkable, except that it isn't.

It's almost as though there's two different sets of laws or standards at work here. One for the Rainbow Moloch and another for everyone else. But let's not go there; here's the collect for Candlemas:

ALMIGHTY and everliving God, we humbly beseech thy Majesty, that, as thy only-begotten Son was this day presented in the temple in substance of our flesh, so we may be presented unto thee with pure and clean hearts, by the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Light up those candles and pray, it's needed.

God bless,

LSP

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Candlemas


Presentation of Christ in the Temple

Happy Candlemas to all - in the 'old' rite purple was used for the distribution of candles and procession, emphasizing the penitential aspect of Simeon's prophecy to Our Lady, that a "sword shall pierce through your own soul also". During the Mass itself, vestments of the Sacred Ministers and Altar change to white, which is dramatic if done well. Well, I like it and so do others as the liturgical ravages of the Woodstock generation are gradually rewound and old becomes new again.


Speaking of church, its interesting to note that Blues drummer, John Chane, Bishop of Washington D.C., has announced he'll retire in 2011. He succeeded Jane "Holmes" Dixon; I won't comment but I'll leave you with a picture.



Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.

Gun rights,

LSP