PRESENTATION OF THE LORD
2
February
|
CANDLELIGHT’S WONDER CHILD
Fr. Mervyn Carapiet
Light a candle and put it in the
hand of a young child at a Baptism or Holy Communion. A moment of magic! It’s
the look of the child, the soft gleam on the innocent cheek, the glint in the
eye, in which the world lights up as words fail or are not needed to describe
the wonderment of childhood in the glow of candlelight. The words are unlikely
to be heard. The action itself is simple and elemental. The eyes of a child at
candlelight are not only worth seeing but also pondering as adulthood melts
away to defer to childhood once again. All one need do is place a lighted
candle in the hand of a child in order to bear witness to one of our basic
capacities - the ability for wonderment. It’s something that belongs to each
one of us but can so easily be starved or, like a candle itself, be quenched
and extinguished. Giving a lighted candle to an adult can easily cause
embarrassment and make them look sheepish, as though they had grown out of all
that long ago. But as like as not, the child nearby may say, “I want to hold
it.” And then the grownup may see what the child had seen, and smile, perhaps with
nostalgia for what they had lost or forgotten.
That is why the feast of Candlemas
is so necessary. Its observance has a more complicated history than the simple
holding of the candle. It commemorates that LIGHT that melded youth and old age
into a common childhood glinting with joy and wonderment in the rays of its
heavenly magic. In the great Jerusalem Temple were met Mary, Joseph and the
Child and the aged Simeon and Anna. And the aged Simeon said what has come to
be called in Latin the “Nunc Dimittis”, i.e. “Now let your servant, Lord,
depart in peace.” A dismissal not away from the light but with it.
At this Candlemas we want to avoid
all complexities of history and stay with that candle lit in all its primal
clarity. Religion is immediately in danger as soon as it gets detached from
what is deeply natural to human beings, and our humanity is at risk if it loses
touch with what is co-natural to it, like joyous wonderment. We are shown a
universe that can keep us on our toes, agog with excitement. We need just such
a wide-eyed wonder to keep us in our place; and our place is the limitless
cosmos that the infinite God has entered as a child. The ground of our hope is
God’s delight and confidence in the natural world itself, and us as part of it.
What is natural to us may not always
be enough, but at its deepest it often bears witness to something of great
importance. A child’s natural response of wonder is something which needs to be
cared for and cherished, for it is the beginning of wisdom. Wonder does not
bulk big in school syllabuses or formal tests, nor offer the material for
university degrees; yet the modern world needs the rebirth of wonder in order
to save itself from ennui and boredom. Here again children have something to
teach the grownups who have made the world into a land of mirage merchants. And
most of us who are adults need to rediscover something of the child in us which
gave us this capacity for wonder at one time. Wonder which begins with the
light of a candle may grow up to a much wider reverence for life.
Accepting a candle lit at Candlemas
and looking at its light, we can ask the Lord of light to revive and restore
and strengthen in us the gift of the Wonder Child.
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