The procession and blessing of the candles for the Presentation of the Lord can be found in our current third edition of the Roman Missal. It is one of the most beautiful and most ignored liturgies of our time, a feast for the senses and for the spirit! If you have a copy of the Roman Missal, do look up this liturgy, located at February 2 in the proper of saints, and pray with its beautiful texts.
Today’s feast of the presentation, or Candlemas, as it is also called, celebrates the day, when Jesus and his mother were presented in the temple to fulfill the dictates of Jewish law forty days after the birth of Jesus. It is a day on which humankind offers the Son to the Father and receives the Father’s blessing and a sign that indicates the purification that the Son will complete. It is a day in which prophets and prophetesses like Simeon and Anna live the freedom of the Spirit that the Son will offer us all. It is a day of consecration that concludes the forty days that begin with Jesus’s birth and looks forward to the paschal mystery. It is a day of light in the darkness, of offering and gift.
Candlemas used to be one of the most important Christian celebrations of the year, a day in which all the candles that would be used to give light in the year to come would be blessed by Christ’s own light. For the most part, this is no more. What people do celebrate on this day, however, is Groundhog’s Day. The fact that this is so should be a warning to us about what happens when Christian realities become secularized. It used to be that on the feasting and festivities of Candlemas, people would look to see if bears had arisen from their winter sleep: if they had, the festivities could be all the more joyful, for spring was near at hand. When Candlemas was banned in Protestant lands (some of the reformers saw ritual use of candles as superstitious), the people continued to feast and to keep an eye out for bears on this day looking forward to spring. Eventually, the Christian celebration of the day was completely forgotten, and the attempt to banish what some reformers saw as superstitious led to the full-on secularization of the feast. Groundhogs have replaced bears, and all that is left is a silly secularized superstition. Let us look no more for groundhogs but for Christ, who is still presented in the temple to God, perhaps as hidden to the eyes of the world today as he was at that first presentation, when only a few of the long-enduring faithful recognized him for who he really is.