Candlemas

I don't now what to say here, but its been some time since I've said anything. Candlemas was always one of those odd days, one of those strange times I don't know how to celebrate. The truth? I've always been suspicious and leery of Candlemas. The first one I celebrated after college, when I was still going to church, I was in a very dark time of life and I believed that, perhaps, on this day, some warmth, some light might come to me. It was very cold and back then I walked everywhere. I was numb with the ice and the driving snow, and as I sat through the liturgy I had the hopeless feeling I very often had in church, that of nothing happening. Back at home, in the cold February, having just graduated from college and not knowing what was next for me, still in the winter time coldness and separated from friends, I gave myself up to crying and depression. It would not be the last time.

Part of this is always with me when we come to the dark beginning of February, the Feast of Candles. I have always wanted it to be something. Though I grew up Catholic, nominally, when I took it up on my own and properly returned to that church it was under the influence of Thomas Merton. Flannery O'Connor and other people who had been dead since the 1960s. Their mystical mysterious church wasa thing of the past and priests chuckled at me when I asked if we were having Candlemas blessings and processions. 

The brokenhearted madness, it can only be called madness, of that Candlemas Day after college was echoed several years later. My relationship to church and traditional religion had been like one very poor and unpromising betrothal and one day I left a mass again, feeling mad and deranged and weepy and it was slowly, in the next few days I began to learn something that is the basis of Young Tradition, and the basis of solitary Craft,  that what I needed was going to be found here, at my altar, and if I was going to find God in the temple of my body, I wasn't going to find him anywhere. If I wasn't going to be healed at my sanctuary, no healing would come.

Some lessons are terrible to learn. Candlemas is also called St Bride and dedicated to the saint and the goddess of fire and healing, the lady of inspiration and stories. That Candlemas years ago, though I was totally broken and terrified, was also the time when I decided there was nothing more important to me than being a poet, a storyteller, a writer and an artists. Had I known then that the Spiral Castle and the World Tree and the Cross are one, I would have understood that the healing the Lady sends can be awful and her lessons terrible.

I do not call this time Imbolc. I don't trust the etymology, and I'm not a Wiccan. Nor is this the beginning of spring. That's nonsense. We are deep in winter. I refer to it as Candlemas, the day lights are blessed and we call on the Light, the day the Mother of God was purified and brought the Child Christ into the temple.

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.

Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have taken and given honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.

Who shall remember my house,
where shall live my children’s children

When the time of sorrow is come ?
They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home,
Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.

TS Eliot writes, as the voice of Simeon, the old man who was promised a vision of the Messiah and beheld Jesus, the man who says, Now let your servant go in peace...."

This peace is a strange peace, a peace of the very old who are asking to leave this life, having gone through much hardship, who are acknowledging more hardship to come. Eliot remembers more of Simeon's words, those spoken to Mary, the Mother of Jesus.

According to thy word,
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints’ stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.

(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).

This is a feast of paradox, denying this is not enough. A time of light and a foreboding of darkness, a welcoming and a plea to be released. We cannot unriddle the meaning of Candlemas. We can only welcome it, and learn.

Time to grow silent. Time to have patience with our anxieties and our fears. Time to treasure up all of our prayers and open out temple. Time to see what happens when Christ and his Mother come in..