There’s been a lot of talk in the media this winter about the acceptability of leaving Christmas decorations up until Candlemas. Candlemas (2nd February) falls exactly forty days after Christmas and reflects the ritual requirement of the Jewish people that a new mother should come to the Temple to be purified forty days after giving birth. (The Church of England had a similar service for centuries, known as the ‘Churching of Women’, which was still inflicted on many of our mothers.) Traditionally it’s only at this point that the Christmas season comes to an end. Although I’m usually one of those people who heaves a sigh of relief when all the decorations get put away on Twelfth Night, I’ve felt the same need this year for the comfort and companionship of our Christmas crib, and for various strings of lights and sparkly things that gleam in dark corners. (It has to be said that our Nativity has been augmented over the years by a variety of small wooden animals. Did you not know that there was at least one frog present at the birth of Christ?!)

As is so often the case, the Church year reflects a more ancient calendar that marks the waxing and waning of the seasons. Candlemas falls at the same time as the Celtic festival of Imbolc, at the mid-point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. The prolonged cold and darkness of winter is giving way to a gradual warming of the earth, a time perhaps for lambing, for sowing seeds, for daring to hope that the spring will come. In Ireland Imbolc became Christianized as the feast of St Brigid, and was celebrated as a festival of the home, involving spring-cleaning, a meal around the hearth, and the lighting of many candles. In church at Candlemas the new candles are blessed for the whole year, and there is often a candlelit procession, taking light into the darkest corners of the building.

It’s perhaps no coincidence, then, that Holocaust Memorial Day falls a few days before Candlemas, on 27^th January. The organization’s symbol is a candle flame, and this year’s strapline is #LightThe Darkness. The sheer number of Jews – men, women and children - murdered in the concentration camps of Europe between 1942 and 1945 is eye-watering, shocking, unforgettable. (And let us not overlook the millions of others, including the physically and mentally disabled, communists, homosexuals, Slavs and gypsies who also lost their lives in the camps.) Hearing the endless roll call of the dead, it’s hard to feel anything other than despair at the cold-hearted inhumanity of the perpetrators. And yet the darkness is pierced by pinpricks of light every time an individual is remembered and rescued from oblivion. The stories of many everyday acts of kindness, stoicism, inspiration, courage remind us that every single one of those victims was a child of God, and precious in God’s sight.  

Something similar has been happening on the television this week, as Britain’s death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic rose above 100,000. It’s almost as if there’s a tacit acceptance that when numbers get too large we can no longer take them in, and our minds and imaginations become dulled. So as part of our news programmes we’ve seen representative individuals singled out; we’ve seen their photographs as young people, newly-weds, parents and grandparents; and we’ve heard stories about what made them special to their families and communities. Each bereft family member struggling for words through the tears tells us that love is always stronger than death.

I’m reminded of a reading from the Wisdom of Solomon that’s sometimes used at funeral services:

But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, 

and no torment will ever touch them. 

In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, 

and their departure was thought to be a disaster,

and their going from us to be their destruction; 

but they are at peace. 

For though in the sight of others they were punished, 

their hope is full of immortality.  (Wisdom 3:1-4)

A couple of weeks ago (in ‘Eternity Soup’) I mentioned Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, written in the wake of the First World War and its terrifying destruction. Let me finish with a key line from that work, so important to Mann that he actually wrote it in italics in the middle of a paragraph. ‘For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.’

So if everything gets on top of you this week, light a candle and spend a few minutes gazing into its dancing flame.  Confucius he say, ‘Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness’.