Tag Archives: Winter

Candlemas—Because We Hope to Turn Again

Posted on by
3
The Presentation of Christ ( Luttrell Psalter, 14c) links the gospel story to the candle rituals of February 2.

[On Candlemas] we keep the feast of Mary,
mother of the King, because she on that day
brought Christ, the Ruler’s child, to the temple.
Then after five nights winter is
carried out of the dwellings. 

— The Menologium (English, 10th century) [1]

The first day of February is Candlemas Eve, and the second is Candlemas Day. As the fortieth day after the Nativity, Candlemas marks the final event in the Infancy narratives, when, in accordance with Jewish custom, Mary and Joseph presented the baby Jesus to be blessed in the Jerusalem temple. You can find a reflection on that gospel story in my 2019 post, “Consumed by Love: The Flames of Candlemas.” 

In medieval Europe, people would bring a candle to the church to be blessed on Candlemas. Then they would make a communal candlelight procession in honor of the Christ, whom Simeon, in the Presentation narrative, called “a light to enlighten the nations” (Luke 2:32). A Candlemas prayer beseeches the Light of the world “to pour into the hearts of your faithful people the brilliance of your eternal splendor, that we, who by these kindling flames light up this temple to your glory, may have the darkness of our souls dispelled.”

In the northern hemisphere, this celebration of light coincides with the lengthening of days. We’ve all begun to rejoice that the days are starting a little earlier, lasting a little longer. Sceptics who dismiss Christian festivals as hostile takeovers of pagan celebrations miss the point. The truth of the Incarnate Logos as the deep structure of creation does not compete with the patterns and rhythms of nature; it completes them. In Old English, sunne(“sun”) and sunu (“son”) are nearly identical, allowing a perfect theological pun: Christ is both sodfaesta sunnan leoma (“radiance of the true sun”) and sunu soþan fæder (“Son of the true Father”).

An early Anglo-Saxon poem on the winter solstice, beautifully translated by medieval scholar Eleanor Parker, celebrates the return of the light as Christological: 

As you, God born of God long ago,
Son of the true Father, eternally existed
without beginning in the glory of heaven,
so your own creation cries with confidence
to you now for their needs, that you send 
that bright sun to us, and come yourself
to lighten those who long have lived
surrounded by shadows and darkness, here
in everlasting night, who, shrouded by sins,
have had to endure death’s dark shadow. [2]

Winter’s cold and dark are not quickly undone. Poised midway between winter solstice and vernal equinox, Candlemas is a transitional feast—the last of winter, the first of spring. It will take time for spring to come: now still contends with not yet. “How long the winter has lasted,” lamented New England poet Jane Kenyon, “—like a Mahler / symphony, or an hour in the dentist’s chair.”[3] My friends in Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska echo this seasonal weariness in their Facebook posts. But for those who are faithful and alert, Candlemas marks the turning point, reawakening the hope that spring is on its way.  

Long-term weather forecasts in early February have been going on for centuries, but they always hedge their bets. A sunny Candlemas is but a brief glimpse of future glory, more of a promise than a gift in hand. If the groundhog or the bear emerges from its burrow and sees its shadow, back it goes into hibernation, for spring is still six weeks away. Hope’s object will not be rushed, as traditional wisdom reminds us: 

If Candlemas Day is fair and clear,
There’ll be two winters in one year. (Scotland)

If Candlemas Day be sunny and warm,
Ye may mend yer auld mittens and look for a storm. (Cumbria)[4]

In other words, as T. S. Eliot put it, “wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”[5] But for Ukrainians shivering in the shadow of war; for the homeless huddled in our frigid cities; for the abused and the outcast suffering storms of violence; for African-Americans terrorized by a nation that walks in darkness—Spring can never come soon enough. 

Let us keep the feast: 
Light a candle;
Trust the radiance;
Become the Spring.

[1] The Menologium, translated from Old English by Eleanor Parker in her fascinating and poetic book, Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2022), 88-89. The “five nights” refers to the Anglo-Saxon reckoning of February 6 as the last day of winter before it is “carried out” to make room for spring.  

[2] Ibid., 71-72.

[3] Jane Kenyon, “Walking Alone in Late Winter,” in Collected Poems (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2005), 77. Personally, I will take Mahler over the dentist every time.

[4] Charles Kightly, The Customs and Ceremonies of Britain: An Encyclopedia of Living Traditions (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 66.

[5] T.S. Eliot, “East Coker, III” in Four Quartets (1943). The poet goes on to say, “Wait without thought, for you are not yet ready for thought: / So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” Until it fully arrives, God’s future exceeds adequate description and cannot be grasped. The reader will note that this essay’s title is a positive reversal of the opening line of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday.”

The Mind of Winter

Posted on by
Reply

Bainbridge Island, morning (February 10, 2019).

This year’s winter has been intense across much of North America. Even here in Puget Sound, where snow is mostly occasional and swiftly gone, the drifts lie heavy and deep upon the earth. For those of us accustomed to the Northwest’s seasonal grays and greens, so much whiteness is otherworldly.

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

–– Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man”

Stevens strove to attain the mind of winter, where all the poet’s fictions, the “pathetic fallacy” by which romantics color the world with their own feelings, are stripped away, leaving only the bareness of uninterpreted bedrock reality. The tree without the seductive flutter of fresh spring leaves, or the gaudy makeup of autumn color. Only behold “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” No more delusions or illusions. A wind that is only wind and not the sound of our keening hearts.

Emerson also stood in that bare place, and in what Harold Bloom calls “the central passage in American literature…the crucial epiphany of our literature’s Central Man,” he experienced what he called a vanishing of ego: “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all.” This pure transparency is itself a fiction – the self and its experience are still being celebrated––but it is a brave leap into the mind of winter nonetheless: to see the world as it is, not as we would have it. Let go of our scripts. Stop coloring the world with our desire. Wait without thought, without premature description, for the world to reveal itself in time, to say whatever it wants to say to us.

Although our images of an earthly paradise are painted with the colors of spring and summer, the blank expanses of the Polar regions have haunted our imagination with equal force. In Moby Dick, all that whiteness struck Ishmael as an erasure of everything familiar, revealing “all other earthly hues…the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods…the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls” to be “subtle deceits…whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel house within.”

Not everyone who journeyed to the regions of ice was as dour as Melville. Many were inspired by their experience of the sublime. Sir Ernest Shackleton, writing of his own harrowing sojourn in Antarctica, said, “We had pierced the veneer of outside things…We had seen God in his splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.” But as the history of Polar exploration tells us, such knowledge comes with a cost.

When Amundsen dashed to the South Pole and back with efficient ease and no loss of life, the English admirers of the tragic Scott expedition, who had “died like gentlemen” in the heart of the white void, criticized him for making it too easy and missing the point of full immersion in the mind of winter. “Are these people mad?” was Amundsen’s laconic response.

Bainbridge Island, evening (February 10, 2019).

Literary critic Northrup Frye has described the yearly cycle in terms of mythic archetypes. Spring is dawn, birth, renewal – the realm of comedy. Summer is noon, the season of romance. Autumn is sunset, death, the sphere of tragedy. And winter is darkness and dissolution, whose theatrical form is satire -the naked truth unadorned by projection, uncolored by affection. The cold regarding gaze. And the implication is, “We won’t get fooled again.”

But we will, and that is the endearing nature of the cycle, the turning of the wheel that will take us through comedy, romance and tragedy all over again. We haven’t really forgotten our hard-won knowledge, our steely mind of winter. It’s just that life cannot––should not––be lived without the bright hues of our affections. And so we will keep risking illusion for the sake of the ecstasies that the unromantic Amundsens never taste.

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.