THOUGHTS TO PONDER

February is my least favourite month. There isn’t much light, (although the days begin to get fractionally longer during the month), the weather is often severe, the garden has little colour to cheer the heart, and we move into the sombre preparation of the Lenten weeks.  The Christmas celebrations are a distant memory, and the New Year resolutions bit the dust weeks ago! I reckon that February’s strongest selling point is that it’s only twenty-eight days in length!  And yet, there has always been the lovely tradition of looking for snowdrops at Candlemas on February 2^nd - although I’ve seen several gardens  locally with snowdrops already in bloom. Apart from the Christian symbolism, they are a wonderful reminder that Spring is lurking somewhere in the shadows, ready to come on stage in a blaze of colour and new life.  Snowdrops remind us of the hiddeness as well as the possibility of Spring, just as daffodils herald its arrival!  But even now they are appearing despite gales, frost and rain, their delicate appearance belying a strength which can push through snow…

Within the Church, Feb 2nd marks the presentation of Christ in the Temple which took place, according to Luke (Chapter 2) forty days after his birth.  It commemorates his meeting with Simeon, expressed in the beautiful words of the Nunc Dimittis.

In the Eastern Orthodox churches it became known as ‘the Meeting’, but with us as Candlemas, because traditionally beeswax candles are lit and carried in a procession commemorating the entrance of Christ, as the Light of the World, into the Temple.  The refrain is echoed in the lighting of the Easter candle at the close of the service on Easter Eve ‘The light of Christ.’  Darkness vanquished.

What does that translate into in the face of the recent tsunami and the approach of the sixtieth anniversary of the Holocaust, as well as the ongoing suffering and cruelty around the world?  It’s a question that we must grapple with.  One thing global communication has made more real is the reality of global community.  We’re in this together.  Africans have a good way to define that sense of interdependence: I am sick in my brother.’ What happened at Auschwitz diminished all of us. The countries around the Indian ocean were vulnerable when catastrophe struck, and will now need ongoing support.  If churches are about anything they must surely be about standing alongside the dispossessed, the broken, the despairing, holding fast to the belief that the springtime of new possibility and of new hope is hidden even in this…..

Mary McMahon