Its Saint Bridget’s Day today, and Candle mass so its a combined holy-day for reasons which I hope we’ll see are quite interesting.
Candlemas is a very high church festival; Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate it – but nonconformist reform traditions not so much. It relates to the presentation of Jesus in the temple forty days after his birth. A woman was required in Mosaic law to abstain from attending the temple for forty days after childbirth (during which time she was considered unclean) and on the fortieth day she could return and be ‘re-consecrated’, as it were, in a service of purification.
This ritual was preserved in Christian custom and until relatively recently there used to be a ceremony called ‘churching’ when a new mother could be blessed and welcomed back into communion.

Seems utterly barbaric to me despite the excuse that it was effectively giving the woman forty days rest.

Malcolm Guite the poet whose Singing Bowl we heard last week is a theologian at Cambridge University and he writes about Candlemas:

“Candlemas is the day the old man Simeon took the baby in his arms and recognised him as ‘A Light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel.’ It became the custom of the church to light a central candle and bring it to the altar to represent the Christ-light, and also on the occasion of this feast to bless all the ‘lights’ or candles in the church, praying that all who saw that outward and visible light would remember also and be blessed by the inner light of Christ ‘who lightens everyone who comes into the world.’

It had always been prophesied that God would one day come into the Temple that human beings had built for him, though Solomon, who built the first temple had said ‘even the Heavens are too small to hold you much less this temple I have built’. Candlemas is the day we realise that eternity can come into time and touch us in the form of a tiny child, that God appears at last in His Temple, not as a transcendent overlord, but as a vulnerable pilgrim, coming in His Love to walk the road of life along side us.”

Perhaps Malcolm Guite is right that the presentation of Jesus and the symbol of ‘the light to the world’ affords the symbolic opportunity to bless the candles which we’ll go on to use throughout the year.
But what, I hear you ask (those of you who are still awake), is the connexion to St Bridget whose day we also celebrate today?
Its probably an example of Christian syncretism. Syncretism is what we call it when one religion is absorbed into another and generally speaking we are rather wary of it now, in fact specifically mainstream Christians are especially wary of it; they often accuse Unitarians, who recognise the validity of many traditions, of syncretism but once upon a time it was mainstream Christianity itself which was capable of absorbing the faith traditions of the cultures it moved into; as Christian evangelisers encountered a folk ritual or custom that was impossible to overcome they would appropriate and absorb it.
Today in the pagan year is the festival of Imbolc, its when the new year begins to be felt in earnest, like the first kicks of a tiny life inside a mothers womb – its also called the ‘quickening’, it has various symbols like the snowdrop but also the sword, the candle and the flame because it is a festival of Fire.
The celtic triple goddess Breedh or Bride or Bridget was transformed in tradition into the Irish Christian Saint Bridget, whose symbol is a candle.
Across almost all world religious traditions; Zoroastrian, Sikh, Hindu, the Abrahamic religions, native American and Australian aboriginal and African traditional practice; fire is a symbol of purification. All recognise the purifying qualities of fire –
In his superb essay ‘The Psychoanalysis of Fire’ the theorist Gaston Bachalard tells us that
‘Fire is the ultra-living element.
It is intimate and it is universal.
It lives in our heart.
It lives in the sky…
Among all phenomena, it is really the only one to which there can be so definitely attributed the opposing values of good and evil…
It can contradict itself; thus it is one of the principles of universal explanation.’

In the Hebrew Bible book of Exodus Yahweh appears to Moses as a burning bush and then to lead the children of Israel in the wilderness as a column of fire, for Isaiah the word of the lord is as a burning coal on his lips, and the writer of Luke also uses the image of fire repeatedly associating it with the holy spirit of God; the Rhuah Hodesh, which appears as tongues of flames to the disciples, suddenly giving them universal clarity to understand and be understood in all the languages of human kind.

In our reading John the baptist tells his followers that the one they await the Messiah prophesied by Isaiah will baptise not with water but with fire and he will burn up the chaff in his threshing house.

I ve always been just as troubled by the interpretation often ascribed to that scripture as I’ve been by the idea that a woman could be unclean after childbirth and could require purification. So is there a metaphor I’m not seeing? Can I interpret this image in another way?

As Unitarians we reject the idea of Hell-fire. We might however still be able to understand that discipleship of any spiritual practice and, in fact, commitment of any kind will require a ‘burning away’ of the impurities of our character; my laziness, my selfishness, my falling short of what I aspire to, my falling out of tune with the divine in life is what I choose to be ‘baptised with fire’.

We can reclaim the objective of purification I think and take this opportunity to re-dedicate ourselves to our resolutions or our promises to ourselves, but also now is a good time; now – today, to set aside the deadened ways of thinking and working that threaten to hold us back and resolve instead to start afresh.

Just as some plants only flourish after the old brush has been burned away, and some only seed when fire sends seed-pods bursting out into the newly cleared terrain, so we can see this point in the year, this candlemas, as a new moment to seize the day, to clear out the dead wood that is holding our spiritual dedication back.

For us the chalice is a meaningful symbol because it represents the spirit of truth, the spirit of inquiry, the enlightenment values of freedom of conscience and civil liberty, the brightness of education for all, the warmth of fellowship regardless of race, class, ability or identity. Our chalice symbol calls to mind the beacon of liberty that radicals like Joseph Priestley insisted should be symbols of the French and American revolutionary movements
The candle which burns with a pure and wavering flame is a symbol of all these things and more, a symbol of hope, of faith, of aspiration reaching up and leading us upwards towards the best of which we are capable.