Candlemas 2022: Shedding Some Light and Finding Some Hope

Call it Candlemas or the Presentation of Our Lord (as we do in The Book of Common Prayer 1979) or even, as most people in the United States do, Groundhog Day, this day forty days after Christmas and midway between the Winter Solstice  and Spring Equinox marks a subtle turning of the seasons. Even this year, when February 2 finds most of Nebraska in frigid temperatures and other parts of the Midwest and Plains under winter storm watches and warnings, there is a noticeable difference in the slant of the sunlight and the length of days that helps us know in our bones that spring is on its way. 

This day on the church calendar offers rich stories and prayers for reflection. Even though the church’s texts for the day have no immediate connection to concerns for caring for the planet or its people and other creatures, a subtle connection is there. I wonder whether these texts with images of fire and light connect so easily yet indirectly to caring for the earth because some old European calendars considered this the beginning of spring.

Today’s Eucharistic reading for the Presentation of Our Lord (Luke 2:22-40) tells the story of Mary and Joseph taking the infant Jesus to the temple. Simeon recognizes Jesus as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel” and blesses him, and Anna, an elderly woman who is a prophet living in the temple, begins to praise God and talk about the child.

Denise Levertov wrote a short poem called Candlemas. (Read the poem here, or find it in Levertov’s collection The Stream & Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes.) Speaking of Simeon, Denise Levertov wrote:

What depth 

of faith he drew on,

turning illumined

towards deep night.

Simeon’s turn towards the deep night brings us beyond his joyful declaration that he has seen the Lord’s salvation to his words to Mary: “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed…and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” It takes a certain depth of faith, a firm foundation, for Simeon toilet himself look beyond the wonder of the moment with this blessed infant to the difficult times Simeon sees in Jesus’s future.

Deep faith like Simeon’s offers a place to ground ourselves in times like ours. This week HBCU’s have endured threats of violence, we heard about books being banned from school libraries and classrooms, and even though the number of Covid-19 cases is finally heading downward again, deaths from the omicron surge continue. And, of course, we face the effects of climate change, which are both unfolding around us in ever more apparent ways and yet, because of their magnitude, exist nearly beyond our imagination. Awareness of the reality of what is happening as our world warms can result in feelings of hopelessness. This hopelessness slides easily into cynicism, a feeling that there is nothing to be done and no reason to do anything significant to try to change things. On the other hand, some people handle the situation by embracing false hope, either denying that anything significant is happening at all or supposing that a few changes here and there — but nothing that changes our way of life very much — will be sufficient to magically return our climate to stability. (False hope is the coinage of greenwashing and of political crumbs thrown to environmentalists.)

Deep faith offers an alternative to both cynicism and false hope. Deep faith turns to the darkness, the “deep night”; deep faith sees the reality of the loss of species and climate stability and acknowledges it. But instead of turning away or being swallowed by the darkness, deep faith allows us to be illumined and reflect some of that light into the reality of the world around us. 

Deep faith tells us that our prayers and our actions will have some profound meaning, that our efforts are worth something even if we don’t get the results for which we fervently pray. Deep faith assures us that God is good and all will be well even when we can’t envision what “all will be well” could mean in a rapidly warming world. 

Deep faith sustained Mary after Simeon told her, “a sword will pierce your own soul too” and in her future when she experienced the pain of seeing her son suffer.  It can be our sustenance in 2022 and in the years ahead. Being intentional about tending to our souls, to growing our faith deeper, is essential to the church’s response to environmental degradation and to all the other challenges that we cannot ignore if we follow Jesus’s commandment to love our neighbors.

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This post is updated from one published on February 2, 2015.