Oops. I forgot Candlemass and the Transfigutation

 Someone in a Facebook broup I follow asked whether anyone had anything to say about Lammas Day, which is a commemoration in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, so I thought I would pot a link to what I had assumed I had written in this blog.  Duh.  I had skipped these two.  So, like feasts born out of time, I am writing about them now.

Candlemass, or the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, or the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, corresponds to the old celtic celebration of Imbolc, the beginning of spring.  Light is just beginning to return to the world.  In the church year, it is a time for blesing of candles, of little lights, and Jesus is recognized as the light of the world by Anna and Simeon.  Simeon makes this clear in the canticle which has come to be the night-time prayer of the church, the Nunc Dimmitis:

     Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word,

      For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,

     Which thou has prepared before the face of all people,

     To be a light to lighten the Gentiles and to be the glory of thy people Israel.

Six months later on the old celtic and british calendar comes Lamma, the feast of the harvest, a feast also known as Lughnasadh, celebrating the god of the sun, Lugh. It is high summer.  The church celebrates this time as the full revelation of the light of Christ the Sun of Righteousness, as Isaiah says,, to three of his closest disciples, with the roles of Ann and Simeon taken, so to speak, by Moses, and Elijah.  Once again, it is, in the words of Simeon, 'according to thy word'--Moses and Elijah being the law and the prophets.

These feasts also show how the coming of Christ fulfills not just the prophecies given to the people of Isael, but as the fulfillment of the prophecies given to even the nations who are also looking for an understanding of the holy.

Lamas, is particularly interesting because it is celebrated with a loaf of bread.  Once again, Jesus is the fulfillment not just of the prophetic manna in the wilderness but of all  human hunger.   He is the first fruits of all creation. He is he true bread, which comes down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will never hunger.

epigraph

a wheel was shown to me,
wonderful to behold . . .
divinity is in its omniscience
and omnipotence
like a wheel,
a circle,
a whole,
that can neither be understood,
nor divided,
nor begun nor ended. --hildegard of bingen

getting started, or, don't try this at home

one never knows where the path will lead.

it is 6:00 in the morning on the third sunday of advent, still dark and eighteen degrees. i light a candle, pull a blanket around my shoulders, and begin morning prayer. "o lord, open thou our lips, and our mouths shall show forth thy praise." because it is advent, i start with venite (psalm 95:1-7, 96:9,13), which ends with
"for he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth,
and with righteousness to judge the world
and the peoples with his truth."

next, because it is the sixteenth morning of the month, follow psalms 79, 80, 81, beginning
"o god, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple
have they defiled, and made jerusalem a heap of stones."

psalm 81 concludes
"i would have fed them also with the finest wheat-flour;
and with honey out of the stony rock would i have satisfied them."

then comes a reading from isaiah, promising the desert will bloom (ch. 35), and because it is sunday, the te deum. the new testament reading describes the birth of john the baptist (luke 1:57ff), and by the time his father zecheriah is singing that
"the dayspring from high has visited us,
to give light to them that sit in the darkness, and in the shadow of death . . ."
a cold winter sunrise is reddening the south-east horizon, showing through my frosty plastic window a hundred-acre wood dusted with snow.

i sing christina rossetti's "in the bleak mid-winter" softly.

i am very cold, and most people would think me very alone, and i am very happy.

how did i get here? did the circling path that led to this cold hermit's morning begin the early fall morning my kayak took me around a bend of the st. francis river to find a huge bald cypress becoming dozens of great blue herons in the sunrise? yes.

did it begin the morning in the season of epiphany when i walked cautiously through the red doors of all saints' episcopal church to enter the daily office? yes.

or did it begin when i moved to santa fe to watch sunsets? yes.

by the grace of god when there has been a fork in the road, at least for the past thirty years, i have taken it. gradually the curves had led me back to the place where i had begun, to find it for the first time.

i began to notice what was happening, that i was becoming an accidental hermit, during a three-year long exploration of the waters of north-west washington and south british columbia in a red folding kayak named brendan. i cautiously cast off from a dock in anacortes one may morning, weighted down with all the gear the fear-and-gear mongers want to sell paddlers, and with the expectation of seeing a lot of beautiful "nature." three septembers later, i pulled up on an afternoon beach in bellingham, wearing only shorts, carrying a single cooking pot and a century-old copy of the holy bible, authorized version.

i knew i did not want to move back into a house, or to return to a career. as francis of assissi said, we do not live in houses. and as i've been told tom robbins said, " a career is a totally inadequate response to life. asked what i had learned, i was surprised to find the answer was easy. what i had expected to be many parts of nature had proved to be one whole creation.

a neighbor in the ozarks is shocked and a bit worried that i live without what she calls creature comforts, but i find that what i have found are the comforts of the creature, that, as annie dillard wrote, we are all created.

if you decide to take the path, do not expect it to lead to my little hut in the ozarks. do not be afraid that you will end up cold and alone on a snow morning. but do pay attention. what the holy one has in store for you is more than we can hope for or imagine.

pay attention. stay awake. put an axe in your television and watch the sunsets and the sunrises instead of listening to morning edition. sing with mary in the evening and zechariah in the morning instead of listening to mp3's. read the daily office instead of the new york times.

i'm alive serious here. there is a great pearl in that field, but if you are not willing to sell everything that you hve to buy it, you will die with the stuff for a good yard sale, but you will miss living in the kingdom of heaven.

on time, life, and the recreation of the universe

for many years now i have been pondering the wonderful way the "church year" brings together the elements of the universe and of our life in christ. i am not becoming any younger, so if i want to put this together in some hopefully helpful form, the time to do it is now.

what i want to do is to try to establish the relationship between the day, the week, and the year, then to show how the same patterns are revealed in our lives in christ as part of the recreation of the universe.

your responses are welcomed.

1. evening and morning:the holy one

"in the beginning, god created the heavens and the earth." (genesis 1:1)

thus begins the story which comprehends all stories. it is the story not only of the holy one's creation of all things, but also of his self-revelation through all things.

how could it be otherwise? if it is true for us, who are created in the image of god, that all writing is autobiography, all painting self-portraiture, should it surprise us if creation is the first way god shows himself?

the story continues:

"now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God's spirit hovered over the water.

"god said, "let there be light,' and there was light. god saw that light was good, and god divided light from darkness. god called light 'day,' and darkness he called 'night.' evening came and morning came: the first day." (genesis 1:1b-5)

thus comes about god's first creations, light andtime. with time, evening and morning, the first day, comes also a pattern we can see repeated again and again. out of darkness comes the light. here in these opening verses of genesis are predicted (in the literal sense of "spoken before") the mystery of pregnancy and birth, samson's riddle, the exodus from egyptian slavery, the season of advent, and the resurrection from the dead. here we are given a hermeneutic for understand all the scripture to follow. here eternity puts on the clothing of time, even as god in christ will put on the clothing of flesh.

2. festivals, days, years:cosmic events

"god said, 'let there be lights in the vault of heaven to divide day from night, and let them indicate festivals, days and years.'" (genesis 1:14)

many modern writers, non-christian and christian both, assume that festivals are somewhat arbitrary, being entirely human inventions, no divine revelation of them having happened or being possible. but genesis asserts, in agreement with most people everywhere who live close to nature, to the creation, that festivals are part of the same natural order as "scientifically observable" days and years. this assertion is not primarily epistemological, about how we know things, but ethical, about how we live. how we celebrate festivals is deeply important not only to our well-being, but to the well-being of the whole world.

so isaiah will report "the word of yahweh" both as
"what are your endless sacrifices to me?
. . .
i am sick of holocausts of rams,
and the fat of calves.
the blood of bulls and goats revolts me.
. . .
new moons, sabbaths, assemblies--
i cannot endure festivals and solemnities.
. . .
your hands are covered with blood,
wash, make yourself clean." (isaiah 1:10-16)

and as

"Jacob, you have not invoked me,
you have not troubled yourself on my behalf.
you have not brought me your sheep for holocausts
nor honored me with sacrifices." (isaiah 43:22-23)

3. male and female:icon of god as community

"god said, 'let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild beasts and all the reptiles that crawl upon the earth.

"god created man in the image of himself,
in the image of god he created him,
male and female he created them.

"god blessed them . . . ." (genesis 1:26-28)

at first this passage may seem an odd choice in a reflection on time, on what we usually call the church year. but the holy one's creation is not an abstract or merely subjective act. nor is it, despite many writers' claims, perfect. it is good, indeed very good. but not perfect, not finished. jesus will say, "my father goes on working, and so do i." (john 5:17) he will also model what it really means to be a master, assuming the role of a slave and washing his disciples' feet (john 13:1-20). but that will be far in the future. for now this mancreature, male and female, is iconic and prophetic. this is the particular creature which god blesses, who is created in "our own image, in the likeness of ourselves," revealing that the creator, although one god, is also a community, whom this mancreature will come to know as a trinity of persons, coming to understand that our own personhood exists fully in community as well. and ultimately in the incarnation, the holy one will take on our very flesh. god's spirit will hover over mary the mother of jesus in a new creation. all of these things will happen in time, not as randomly strung beads of chaos, of unrelated events, but in days and months, weeks and years, that reveal the continuing work of god and that form us in his image day by day. we are created both to be the recipient of the holy one's self-revelation and the agents of that revelation. we are blessed, the only part of creation of which this is said, to be a blessing.