Have you bought candles for All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day? Or are you recycling last year’s candles? Or are you trying the new rechargeable candles? Or are you yourself the fragile candle in the wind you offer at the grave of your beloved? Welcome, then, Candles of All-Sorts to your Day.
You see, when I went on retreat recently, I found myself struck by candle images in some classics. Let me cite two.
First, from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Out, out brief candle!/Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,/ that struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more.” To me, this is the blackout game of Macbeth—a person Robert Short might call today a vulture-evangelist. Vulture-evangelists, like Macbeths, prey subtly on our human transgressions: damnation by man’s worthless works, disbelieving in salvation by God’s grace. Macbeths preach man is his own candle-god, capable of charting his own eternal destiny through the darkness. And when it’s over, it’s over. There is no guarantee there will be another Macbeth to gather the melted wax and wick and recycle into another candle-god.
Second, from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov: Zossima lights a candle with a woman who has committed unspeakable crimes and is suddenly shaking in fear of death, “A human being cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin that could exceed the love of God? Believe that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that he loves you with your sin, in your sin. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner, even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God.” Zossimas are candle-bearers: they will help you light your melting candle, by offering her own candle-heart, maybe even help you gather the melted wax and wick and reshape you into another, like eternally floating candle wicks in a small cup of oil.
Are you a Macbeth or a Zossima? Candle-god or candle-heart? We must admit to being both, because we are. And so we light candles and pray for our dead at least once a year in the hope that from heaven, where God dwells, we re-create what Christ once said when he dwelled among us, “cast fire upon the earth” (Luke 12:49). Fire from millions of candles lit up on All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, and from our candle-hearts and our candle-gods on All-Sorts Day. Fire that will prove the false prophets in us and about us all wrong. Fire that will consume all easy ways out from our false securities and insecurities. Fire that will scare the “hell” out of us by scaring it into us, and so we turn to pray for forgiveness of our beloved dead to be released soon from the fires of purgatory, or spared the fires of hell.
“Peculiar Christendom, whose most pressing problem seems to consist in this, that God’s grace in this direction should be too free, that hell, instead of being amply populated, might one day perhaps be found empty.” That is Karl Barth, reflecting in The Word of God and The Word of Man.
As for me, I look forward to the Grand Reunion at the end of time—the Last Judgment, it is called, when Christ returns in a Great Fire. I believe that Fire is His Great Love—Deus Caritas Est. And so this long weekend, I pray for you who still light, like me, our fragile candle-lives and for all I love who have moved on to the Pearly Gates: that we may all have peace of soul during life, at the moment of death, and beyond. Blessed All Saints and All Souls’ Day to you!
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