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Candlemas
An icon of the Meeting, showing Mary passing Jesus into the arms of Simeon ‘the God-receiver’ in the Temple at Jerusalem. The icon dates back to 1408. Candlemas is a peculiarly English name: others include the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, and the Purification of Mary. However, Elfric of Eynsham followed the long-standing practice of the Church of Jerusalem by concentrating on the meeting with Simeon, and the theme of Christ as ‘a light to lighten the gentiles.’
Back to text
An icon of the Meeting, showing Mary passing Jesus into the arms of Simeon ‘the God-receiver’ in the Temple at Jerusalem. The icon dates back to 1408. Candlemas is a peculiarly English name: others include the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, and the Purification of Mary. However, Elfric of Eynsham followed the long-standing practice of the Church of Jerusalem by concentrating on the meeting with Simeon, and the theme of Christ as ‘a light to lighten the gentiles.’
Introduction
Candlemas is the English name for a Christian feast also known as the Presentation of Christ, the Purification of the Virgin, and the Meeting of the Lord. It is kept on February 2nd, forty days after Christmas, and in Anglo-Saxon times was a night of candle-lit processions and carol singing almost on a par with Easter.
CANDLEMAS is the English name for a Christian feast on February 2nd each year that the Eastern Churches call The Meeting. ‘On this day’ explained Elfric, tenth-century Abbot of Eynsham, ‘we bear our candles to church, and let them there be blessed.’ The congregation would then carry them round to all the churches of the area, singing hymns. ‘For on this day’ he went on ‘was Christ, the true Light, borne to the temple, who redeemed us from darkness and bringeth us to the Eternal Light.’
Back in the 380s, pilgrim Etheria discovered that on that day in Jerusalem, ‘there is a procession, in which all take part, in the Church of the Resurrection, and all things are done in their order with the greatest joy, just as at Easter.’ The tradition spread after 541, when public prayers and processions at Candlemas brought relief from a bitter famine afflicting Constantinople, the Imperial capital, and the feast had reached England in the eighth century.
See his ‘Sermon on the Purification of the Virgin Mary’.
Etheria attended services at the Anastasis, that is, the Resurrection or Church of the Holy Sepulchre. At the time, the day was forty days after the Epiphany on January 6th, because there was as yet no separate feast of the Nativity on December 25th. Once that had come into use during the fifth century, the Meeting was duly brought forward to February 2nd. For Etheria’s account, see ‘The Pilgrimage of Etheria’, translated and edited by M.L. McClure and C.L. Feltoe.
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