Light in the Dark, Love in the Ruins

Not the same thing as love in ruins! Sunday just past was Candlemas. Whatever one makes of groundhogs and their shadows, Candlemas marks a significant transition of the year in a number of different registers: astronomically, historically, socially and religiously. It is the meeting, hypapante to use its Greek title, a coming together of Law and Prophecy, of the Old Testament and the New, a meeting of ancient Simeon and aged Anna the Prophtess and the very young, of the infant Christ and his young mother, Mary, in short, of men and women and a child. A meeting in the Temple in Jerusalem.

The full title itself joins together the practices of Eastern Orthodox and Western Christianity. The former marks that day as the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, forty days after Christmas; the latter as the Feast of the Purification of St. Mary the Virgin; in short, a joint festival of Mary and Jesus. Since the fifth century, it has been observed with lighted candles, and, hence, the more convenient moniker, Candlemas. It was a 17th century Anglican Bishop, John Cosin who joined the titles in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the mother Prayer Book of the Anglican Communion.

Candlemas looks backward to Christmas and ahead to Holy Week and Easter. As such it marks the transition from light to life. Astronomically, February 2nd is one of the cross-quarter days in between Christmas Day, Dec 25th, and Lady Day, the Annunciation, March 25. It falls roughly half-way between the winter solstice (December 21) and the spring or vernal equinox (March 20). Already we have seen some of the quantum leaps in sunlight and the lengthening of the days.

Yet the themes of Light and Life meet in the greater wonder of Love. Christmas in the Christian understanding never loses sight of Christ’s sacrifice and thus to the underlying principle of the divine love which seeks the ultimate good of our humanity, even in the face of the disorders, chaos, and evils of our hearts and our world.

Thus, this week the Chapel reading was Paul’s outstanding and powerful hymn of love, an extended paean of praise about charity in 1st Corinthians 13. It has been a Chapel tradition to read that passage in the lead-up to the week of winter carnival and the Valentine’s Dinner and Dance. Charity is the operative word. It appears explicitly nine times in thirteen verses and implicitly eleven times for a total of twenty references. Paul is facing the question about the building up of a community, identifying that beyond the justice of the parts of the body acting in concert, there is “a still more excellent way.” That “more excellent way” is love understood at once as transcendent, from God, and as immanent, in us and in our lives together in community.

Charity, an english translation of the Latin, caritas, is the translation of one of four words for love in Greek. The Greek word is agape, often associated with what bonds us together in community. Here it is something divine given to be lived in us. It is one of the three theological virtues which perfect the four cardinal virtues which also belong to character, to who we are as persons, and, ultimately, to what belongs to human perfection which is more than something individual.

As such, Paul’s hymn speaks to the darkness, the disorders and the disarray of our own world and day as well as to our hearts in uncertainty and fear. It is not too much to say that we find ourselves in a disturbed and disturbing world where so many of the certainties of the past 75 years are past and gone whether one thinks in terms of the end of neoliberalism, the rise of illiberal progessivism, the various antics of dictatorial vanity and governmental follies, or the end of Pax Americana. We live in uncertain times nationally and internationally regardless of our own particular political views and passions.

In one way this is not new. What is perhaps new is the sense of nostalgia for the illusions of the post-World War II world which seemed to promise material progress and personal freedoms globally and individually. Paul’s hymn counters the myth of the autonomous individual and thus challenges us about how to think about ourselves as living with, and for, and from one another in a way that belongs to the radical truth and dignity of our humanity. It asks us to think more deeply and more inwardly in the face of the darkness and the ruins of culture and civilization. And that is, we might say, the radical nature of God’s love.

“Charity never faileth” because it belongs to God and yet speaks to an end or purpose for our humanity in terms of our knowing even as we are known in God’s love. Thus the Candlemas light in the darkness signals the power of love in the ruins, however we might understand or experience them. Faith, hope, and charity are the theological virtues which belong to the perfection of the cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice. Charity is the greatest, not because it eclipses the others, but because it unites them in their perfection and truth. The charity of God recalls us to the transcendence of God’s love and its immanent power and life in us, not in flight from the world but even in its midst. To think this love is to begin to feel it.