Introduction to Candlemas
Fr. Neil Fernyhough's Introduction to Candlemas
Today’s festival comes with many names. In the Book of Common Prayer, it is “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called The Purification of St. Mary the Virgin.” The BAS simply calls the feast “The Presentation of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple.” But for many Anglicans and Catholics, today is known by the ancient name “Candlemas.” This reflects the tradition of blessing candles on this day, symbolic of the light coming into the world with the recognition of the Messiah by Simeon and Anna.
The many names illustrate the wealth of meaning in today’s worship: presentation, purification, coming together, light for the world. It is a feast day, and the revelation of the child in the Temple invites a joyful response. Yet, the prophetic words of Simeon, which speak of the falling and rising of many and the sword that will pierce the heart of Mary, foreshadow the Passion and Easter.
This prophetic foreshadowing of suffering, coming as it does so close to Lent, turns Candlemas into a kind of pivot in the Christian year. It is as if we say today, “A last look back to celebrating the incarnation, then turn toward the cross!” This is why the ancient terms Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima are applied to the Sundays after Candlemas – the last three Sundays after Epiphany. We now look toward Lent, and these terms remind us of the days (70 - Septua, 60 - Sexa, 50 - Quinqua) before the Passion of Christ on Good Friday.
Where did the day come from? A document dated to the fourth century attests to the feast in the Jerusalem Church on February 14 (forty days after the nativity of Jesus). In regions where Christmas was celebrated on Dec. 25, the feast began to be celebrated on February 2, where it is kept in the West today. In the past, Candlemas was seen as the end of the Christmas season. The blessing of candles did not come into common use until the 11th century.
The feast coincides with a Celtic pagan festival called Imbolc, which for Christians became the feast day of Saint Brigid, Ireland's patroness saint. Imbolc marks the halfway point between the winter solstice and spring equinox, and was marked by rituals associated with the rebirth of the light. In this sense, there was a happy coincidence [or arguably cultural appropriation] between existing customs and Scriptural chronology.
Another influence of the pagan festival was the tradition of predicting the year’s weather patterns. It was thought that the rest of winter would be the opposite of whatever the weather was like on Candlemas Day. An old English song goes:
If Candlemas be fair and bright, Come winter, have another flight; If Candlemas brings clouds and rain, Go winter, and come not again.
Thus if the sun cast a shadow on Candlemas day, more winter was on the way; if there was no shadow, winter was thought to end soon. This practice led to the folklore behind Groundhog Day, which falls on Candlemas.