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The Feast we celebrate this Sunday is called the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. On this day we definitively close out the Advent/Christmas cycle. It is forty days since Christmas. According to Mosaic Law, women who had given birth were required to offer a sacrifice for ritual purification. Of course, Our Lady was not strictly bound by this law laid down in Leviticus, but the Holy Family was faithful to the ways Our Lord came into the world to overcome. The more modern practice of the “Churching” of women after childbirth, giving them a special blessing is an echo of the Blessed Virgins fulfilment of the Law.
The Feast is also called Candlemas, because there is a solemn blessing of candles, their distribution to the faithful and a procession. The candles underscore the theme of light that pervades the texts for the procession and Mass along with the theme of the temple. The candle placed into the hands of the faithful today recalls that which was bestowed at baptism when the newly baptized is told,
“Receive this lighted candle, and keep you baptism above reproach. Keep the commandments of God, so that when the Lord comes to His marriage feast, you may meet him in the halls of Heaven with all His Said, and may live with Him forever.”
During the Mass on this day the faithful hold their candles lighted during the Gospel and during the Canon. On other days, when Mass is celebrated with some solemnity, those torchbearer represent all of the faithful, who ideally would all be present with their lighted candles, bearing witness to their sharing in Christ’s priesthood by baptism.
In the ancient Roman Church different processions from the deaconries (forerunners of parishes) chanting psalms and antiphons made their way with lighted candles before dawn to the Roman Forum to the Collect church of St. Adrian, which was the Senate House built by Julius Caesar. When the Pope arrived, he and his company put on penitential black. The clergy were given candles blessed at nearby St. Martina (now Santi Luca e Martina). and, again chanting psalms, the procession went through the Forum of Nerva and of Trajan toward the Esquiline, weaving past various churches. Their destination was the Station church, the Basilica of St. Mary Major, which emphasized that this mainly Christological Feast also had its Marian dimension.
In the blessing of the candles and the procession, we hear many references to light and to the evocative figure of elderly Simeon, to whom God granted long years in order to see the Messiah at last and, inspired by the Holy Spirit, to sing his Nunc dimmitis, which all those bound to recitation of the Divine Office repeat at day’s end for Compline.
All through the Mass you will find references to the temple, starting with the Introit antiphon from Ps 47(48): “O God, we ponder Your kindness within Your temple. As Your name, O God, so also Your praise reaches to the ends of the earth.” Prophets of the Old Testament foretold that the Temple’s greatest moment would be when the Messiah was revealed there. This is fulfilled when the Infant King is brought to His Father’s House for the first time. Christ, as firstborn male child, was to be redeemed by an offering. Pius Parsch, the 20th liturgical commentator, remarks in The Church’s Year of Grace:
His presentation at Mary’s hands constituted, we may say, the Offertory of His life. If we align Christ’s redemptive life with the Mass, His presentation in the temple would be the Offertory, His death on the Cross the consecration and elevation. Today the divine Lamb lies on the paten of sacrifice and is offered to the Father. Thirty-three years hence He will complete the act by dying on the Cross. Yes, this day commemorates the oblation of Christ’s whole redemptive work, not excluding the offertory oblations of all believers.
A note about candles and YOU.
Holy Church gives us candles so that we will use them. When I baptize, I suggest to people that they save the candle, with a label indicting what it is and who was there, the name of the priest, etc. Perhaps then they could save that candle against the day when, perhaps, it might be used as one of the candles on the altar for their wedding, or with a home Communion set, for when they need Last Rites. The candle you receive on other days of the year, the Vigil of Easter for example, or for Eucharist processions, could be burned in times of trial or danger, as when storms are coming or there is social upheaval. These candles remind us that we too out to be filled with light for others, in their darkness and difficulties, to see and be guided by.
Candles are beautiful symbols of our sacrifices. They are like living things. They eat and drink the wax from the bees, made collectively in association with sweetness. They breathe air. They move in their flames as they flicker. They communicate to our eyes a beautiful light and give contrast to their surroundings by illumination. They burn out at the end of their span. So do we. They are consumed for the Lord in the liturgy. So should we be. We do all these things. And so, using candles in important times is a very wholesome and Catholic practice. Leaving one of these little candles in a Church, as a symbolic sacrifice of your prayers and petitions is entirely natural.
The prayers for the blessing of candles before Mass are magnificent. Simeon looms large in them, as is proper, along with the theme of light. There isn’t room here to look at all the prayers, but here is the third (translation from the Daily Missal and Liturgical Manual by Baronius Press):
O Lord Jesus Christ, the true Light who enlightenest every man that cometh into this world: pour forth Thy blessing + upon these candles, and sanctify + them with the light of Thy grace, and mercifully grant, that as these lights enkindled with visible fire dispel the darkness of night, so our hearts illumined by invisible fire, that is, by the splendor of the Holy Spirit, may be free from the blindness of all vice, that the eye of our mind being cleansed, we may be able to discern what is pleasing to Thee and profitable to our salvation; so that after the perilous darkness of this life we may deserve to attain to neverfailing light: through Thee, O Christ Jesus, Savior of the world, who in the perfect Trinity, livest and reignest, God, world without end.
There is an adage that sin makes you stupid. Note the connection between vice and blindness and darkness. The visible fire is not just a symbol of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. It also signifies life properly lived, a fact seen by others.
As stated before, the preponderance of the texts for the blessings and Mass are Christ-centered. However, the Vetus Ordo Postcommunion, along with the Roman Station selection, appropriately deliver a Marian sense of the Feast, which is that of her Purification.
Quaésumus, Dómine, Deus noster: ut sacrosáncta mystéria, quæ pro reparatiónis nostrae munímine contulísti, intercedénte beáta María semper Vírgine, et praesens nobis remédium esse fácias et futúrum.
QUITE LITERAL:
We beseech You, O Lord our God, that the sacrosanct sacraments which You have given as the bulwark for our reparation, as the ever-Virgin Blessed Mary intercedes may You cause them to be for us both a present remedy and also a future remedy.