The Feast of the Presentation of the Lord

By Martha Long

The Feast of the Presentation of the Lord (also known as the Purification of Our Lady and Candlemas) is one of my favorite feasts. The feast, filled with references to light, reminds us once again that Our Lord is the Light of the World. Simeon and Anna both had spent their lives praying and waiting for the Messiah. They hoped for the chance to see Him and they were ready to meet Him. This child stood out among all the children brought to the Temple that day. They recognized that light in the child presented to them. Immediately, Simeon burst out with the beautiful prayer, the Nunc Dimittis, which the Church recites each night in Compline, “Now you may dismiss Thy servant in peace O Lord, according to Thy word: For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation, which Thou hast prepared in the sight of all peoples: A light to reveal Thee to the nations and the glory of Thy people Israel.” I love these words.

But Simeon’s words did not end there. He went on to tell Our Lady that because of her Son, her heart would be pierced by a sword. How hard this must have been for her. First, she rejoiced because Simeon’s prayer reminded her of the greatness of her infant Son. But then her joy was turned to sorrow – as so often happens in this vail of tears.

The passage below is from a sermon the feast by St. Sophronius and is found in the Office for this feast.

“Let us receive the light whose brilliance is eternal. In honour of the divine mystery that we celebrate today, let us all hasten to meet Christ. Everyone should be eager to join the procession and to carry a light.

Our lighted candles are a sign of the divine splendour of the one who comes to expel the dark shadows of evil and to make the whole universe radiant with the brilliance of his eternal light. Our candles also show how bright our souls should be when we go to meet Christ.

The Mother of God, the most pure Virgin, carried the true light in her arms and brought him to those who lay in darkness. We too should carry a light for all to see and reflect the radiance of the true light as we hasten to meet him.  The light has come and has shone upon a world enveloped in shadows; the Dayspring from on high has visited us and given light to those who lived in darkness. This, then, is our feast, and we join in procession with lighted candles to reveal the light that has shone upon us and the glory that is yet to come to us through him. So let us hasten all together to meet our God.

The true light has come, the light that enlightens every man who is born into this world. Let all of us, my brethren, be enlightened and made radiant by this light. Let all of us share in its splendour, and be so filled with it that no one remains in the darkness. Let us be shining ourselves as we go together to meet and to receive with the aged Simeon the light whose brilliance is eternal. Rejoicing with Simeon, let us sing a hymn of thanksgiving to God, the Father of the light, who sent the true light to dispel the darkness and to give us all a share in his splendour.

Through Simeon’s eyes we too have seen the salvation of God which he prepared for all the nations and revealed as the glory of the new Israel, which is ourselves. As Simeon was released from the bonds of this life when he had seen Christ, so we too were at once freed from our old state of sinfulness.

By faith we too embraced Christ, the salvation of God the Father, as he came to us from Bethlehem. Gentiles before, we have now become the people of God. Our eyes have seen God incarnate, and because we have seen him present among us and have mentally received him into our arms, we are called the new Israel. Never shall we forget this presence; every year we keep a feast in his honour.”

In paintings of this event, the temple is usually represented in some manner – by a church building or perhaps a canopy and altar. The figures of Simeon and Anna (both in old age) and Our Lady and St. Joseph are always present. The Infant Christ is the central focus, sometimes already in the arms of Simeon. In other paintings Our Lady is shown extending her hands in gesture of offering as she presents the child to Simeon. The exchange is symbolic of the encounter between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. Simeon represents the unbroken chain of inspired prophets who awaited the coming of the promise of salvation. He is the last watchman of Israel and in looking for the dawn he sets his eyes on the true Light. St. Joseph often holds the turtledoves for the sacrifice (either in his hands or sometimes in a basket).

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Father Rutler: The Living Word More Powerful Than Any Sword

Father George W. Rutler

The German word “kitsch” is hard to define, other than “tacky” or “tasteless,” but as Justice Potter Stewart said of prurience, “I know it when I see it.” It is indulged sometimes even by pious Catholics. Examples of kitsch abound in the sculpture garden of the United Nations. My favorite is a huge Colt Python .357 Magnum revolver with a twisted barrel by the Swedish sculptor Carl Reuterswärd. It runs afoul of the dictum vaguely attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “Those who hammer their guns into plows, will plow for those who do not.” There is one superior work, albeit by the Soviet Realist Yevgeny Vuchetich, showing a man hammering a sword into the shape of a plowshare.
    

That allusion, of course, is to verses in Isaiah, Joel and Micah. Communists could pick and choose bits of the Bible when convenient. The Prince of Peace warned that those who live by the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52), but he also told his disciples to buy swords (Luke 22:36) and warned: “I did not come to bring peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). The apparent contradiction is resolved by understanding that Christ speaks of swords both as defensive weapons and, more intensely, as representative of moral suffering.
   

At the Presentation of Christ, Simeon told Our Lady that a sword would someday pierce her heart. This was fulfilled at the Crucifixion, for if there is a pain that can be as hard as physical suffering, it is the empathy one feels when watching the suffering of a loved one.
   

There is much suffering in the Church, and Our Lady of Sorrows endures that, for she is Mother of the Church. In the order of places where Christians are being tormented now, North Korea ranks first, followed by Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan, Eritrea, Libya, Iraq, Yemen and Iran, in a list that is not exhaustive.
   

As Our Lady was virtually abandoned at the foot of the Cross, so have those who are suffering atrocities and genocide been scandalously ignored by many in the West until recently. Our government has announced that it will stop the State Department’s policy of directing all relief funds through ineffective agencies of the United Nations, and will work with private organizations to aid vulnerable religious and ethnic minorities.
   

St. John Paul II said that Simeon’s prediction confirms Mary’s “faith in the accomplishment of the divine promises of salvation, [while] on the other hand it also reveals to her that she will have to live her obedience of faith in suffering, at the side of the suffering Savior, and that her motherhood will be mysterious and sorrowful.”
   

As the pen is mightier than the sword, in Bulwer-Lytton’s adage, so is Christ the Living Word more acute and powerful than any sword that pierces those who love him.

 

 

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Father Rutler: Churches East and West

Father George W. Rutler

In the late 1990s I watched the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, replicating the nineteenth-century cathedral that had been dynamited by Stalin in 1931. It can hold an estimated ten thousand worshipers (they stand throughout the long services, for pews are abhorrent to venerable tradition) and is the tallest Orthodox church in the world with a dome reaching 338 feet. Stalin’s plan to build on its site a Palace of the Soviets with a huge statue of Lenin atop its dome was never realized because of World War II. That recalls the statue of Zeus, “the Abomination of Desolation,” which the Greek ruler of Syria, Antiochus IV, erected in the Jerusalem temple after he despoiled its sacred vessels. Antiochus basked in the title Epiphanes, which means “radiance of God,” but the Jews punned that as Epimanes, or “the mad man.”
 

Two hundred churches are planned for Moscow, along with an estimated thousand across the nation, replacing and adding to those destroyed in the Communist period, during which priests were crucified on the church doors. These are in the classical Byzantine style, not the modern biscuit boxes and flying saucers that were the bane of the West over the last few decades. In some towns, the local people are taught iconography and mosaic art, so the churches really are the work of their own hands.
 

These days in China, where Christianity is oppressed, not especially for theological reasons, but because it is a threat to the political hegemony of the state, churches are being destroyed. Within the past few months, for example, in Henan Province an evangelical church was dynamited in Shangqiu, with a blithe ferocity paralleling that of Stalin.
 

In the West, churches are getting demolished for reasons other than political: redundancy, the lack of need for “ethnic” parishes, and the sheer cost of maintenance. Often, people who are much wealthier than their ancestors who built the churches sacrificially out of their penury, do not contribute enough for maintenance. Between 1995 and the present, the Catholic population in the United States has increased from 57 million to over 70 million.  New churches are being built in the South and West where populations are growing faster than the decline in other parts of the country.
 

There is another factor, however, in the loss of churches in much of our nation, and it is simply indifference. The vice of sloth is a spiritual malignancy, and many of our great metropolises have become hospices for lapsed believers. When I was sent to our parish here in “Hell’s Kitchen,” which is experiencing a phenomenal population growth, I was asked, “How many Catholics live there?” The proper question is, “How many Catholics will live there?”
 

The Ascending Lord did not send his disciples into Catholic neighborhoods, because there were none.