Psalms Archives - Page 17 of 32

The Presentation of the Lord

Scarcely have we reached the calmer waters of Ordinary Time than we have to pause for the feast of the Presentation. This is celebrated every year on February 2nd, but this year that is a Sunday. It’s also a really neat palindromic date, 02.02.2020. When the Presentation falls on a Sunday, there are (surprisingly recent) rules about what we do liturgically, and nowadays the Presentation is a serious enough feast to bump the Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time out of the sequence.

The Presentation, third Epiphany

It used to be one of the most important feasts of the Church’s year, because it’s another ‘epiphany’ or showing-forth. For a long time it was regarded as the last feast of Christmastide (and that’s why you will still find Christmas trees up until February 2nd in some places, including for example this year St Asaph’s Cathedral in North Wales). First we have the showing to the shepherds, the Jews; then to the Wise Men, the Gentiles; then the baby is brought to the Temple where Simeon reveals him to be the Messiah for everyone and the key to God’s eternal plan.

Travelling in time

This does lead to a certain amount of chronological confusion in our Sunday readings. Jesus is an adult at his baptism by John (which we celebrated on January 12th), and the two weeks of Ordinary Time that we have just experienced are a development of the Baptism (2 OTA) and the calling of the first four apostles (3 OTA) as Jesus gathers his team for the work of his public life. Indeed, the Gospel we would be having if Presentation hadn’t bumped it, is the Beatitudes; so we are already squarely into the middle of Jesus’ adult life, with healings, miracles and Sermons on the Mount. But because this year February 2nd is a Sunday, we’re back again with the Lord as a small baby in Mary’s arms, being presented in the Temple, like any other little Jewish first-born boy, with his pair of pigeons.

The Baptism of the Lord

It is in fact the feast of the Baptism as a separate operation which is the latest of the arrivals and the source of the confusion. It has become an increasingly important feast only over the last few Popes. It wasn’t even celebrated in its own right for the early centuries of the Church, then it became a sort of sub-feast attached to the Epiphany. John XXIII fixed it to January 13th, Paul VI tweaked its date slightly, and John Paul II instituted the tradition of baptising Vatican babies on that feast every year, which the current Pope has just happily repeated. More information on the date for other denominations from the ever-helpful wiki here. The Eastern Orthodox tradition is different, still combining the Baptism with the Epiphany as different aspects of the great ‘showing-forth’ or ‘Theophany’.

The Presentation and Candlemas

But we’ve moved on from the Baptism, although we’ve gone back in time as far as Jesus is concerned, and I’m trying to look at next Sunday rather than a couple of weeks back. The date this year is highly appropriate, because it is two feasts in one : Candlemas and the Presentation. Like ‘Christmas’, the shape of the word ‘Candlemas’ indicates that it’s been around for a long time. It refers to the blessing of the Church’s candles for the rest of the year. It was/is celebrated on this feast because of the words of Simeon about Jesus being ‘a light to enlighten the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel’. It is another celebration of the power of light in the darkest part of the year (Northern hemisphere, check your privilege). In the days when people made their own candles for lighting, they would bring those candles also to be blessed. Nowadays we use candles just for special occasions and celebrations (candles on birthday cakes are a fascinating tradition which we hardly think about), so we don’t tend any more to take our own candles for blessing. Maybe we should.

Psalm for Candlemas : 23/24

Those words are in the Gospel, as part of the Nunc dimittis, which the Church uses every night as part of Night Prayer (setting here). The psalm we have for this feast is not one of those where the imagery of light is used, which I discussed recently. Instead it is Psalm 23/24, the toe-curlingly exciting one where we sing to make the gates grow high enough to let in the King of Glory. This is Jesus’ first entrance into the Temple, God’s house; – but God’s house where the Son is given the name of King of Glory. This is why I tried to make the setting as trumpetty as I could, because this is almost like a coronation. And I’ve tried to set it high enough that you feel the reach, but not so high it’s uncomfortable to sing or listen to.

Christ in glory ceiling mosaic — Coronation and glory, thrones, dominions and powers

Presentation and Purification

Epiphany clearly used to be a much more complex feast, with all these potential extras celebrated at the same time, but today we have simplified it and we think of it as the arrival of the Three Kings first and foremost. The Presentation however remains a complex feast. Its first significance is the arrival of Jesus in the Temple and the testimony of Simeon and Anna (and I am grieved every year by not having Anna’s words). Candlemas and the blessing of candles for everyone was grafted on; but yet another major part of the feast is the Purification of Our Lady, because of the requirements of Leviticus.

A male first-born had to be presented in the Temple (with the pigeons as a sacrifice) forty days after birth. The mother, forty days after the birth, is supposed to come to the Temple with a lamb as a burnt offering and another pigeon as a sin-offering, ‘and the priest shall make atonement for her, and she shall be clean’ (Leviticus 12, 1-8).

Purifying something that wasn’t impure anyway

I know this is all about ritual and ceremonial, rather than morality and ethics, but I think the terminology is unfortunate. I am delighted that the modern version of this (basically since Vatican II) is a special blessing (and it’s usually replaced by the blessings given to both parents at the child’s baptism). It’s the same thing as ‘churching’ for the Anglicans. Pollution is not usually a helpful or positive idea to bring into the debate, especially when used by one group (in this case, celibate men) to denote another group to which they cannot in any circumstances belong (new mothers). At the moment I am probably feeling a little over-sensitised to this, and it’s all the fault of English rhyme words.

Rhyme words influencing association

The words for human offspring in English are peculiarly tricky, in this language normally so rich in alternatives. We have ‘child’, ‘baby’, and (at a pinch) ‘babe’. None of them is an easy rhyme (search your Christmas carols; thank goodness at least for ‘boy’ and ‘joy’). When we are talking about the Christ-child, the preference is often given to ‘child’ as somehow being more serious and less babyish. What rhymes with ‘child’? ‘Mild’, which is wussy and exactly fits all those dreadful pictures of Jesus as a little boy with gold curls and a white nighty, too Fotherington-Tomas for words. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,/Look on me a little child ….. and so on. ‘Wild’ is not a helpful alternative, so it is not used much in this context as a rhyme word.

The danger of collocation : pregnancy as ‘defilement’

The other regular option is ‘undefiled’, usually applied to Jesus’ mother, which is really peculiar. Sing of Mary, pure and lowly/Virgin Mother undefiled. Sing of God’s own Son most holy, /Who became her little child. The idea appears to be that unlike all other mothers, Mary has not been contaminated by conceiving, carrying and delivering a baby. I think the contamination here is from the Levitical purification concept : you only need to ‘purify’ something which has become impure. Then you have the sin-offering as well. What sin are we talking about here, precisely? And why only the mother? From here it’s only a small step to translations like ‘Lo! he abhors not the Virgin’s womb’ (from Adeste fideles), which has overtones from the word ‘abhor’ absolutely not there in the Latin. ‘Gestant puellae viscera’ simply means ‘Born of a young girl’. As a mother myself, I do object to the defilement notion, and I firmly reject the idea that ‘purification’is necessary after having a baby, though I like the idea of a special blessing, and I’m all for expressing thankfulness after surviving childbirth.

Moving back to the main timeline

It is interesting to see how fast the tone changes, even during the Gospel itself. We move from the excitement and joy of Simeon and his prayer, to the sombre words he says to Mary, where he predicts rejection and suffering. It would be so fascinating to know what Anna said, especially if she spoke to Mary, as Elizabeth and Mary are the only two women who ever have a conversation in the Gospels (see the Bechdel blog here), but all we know is that she spoke, not what she said. The story is moving on very quickly again. At least we can think of the peaceful years of Jesus’ early life, after this great event, when the family lives peacefully together as the little boy grows up.

Jesus learns to walk, as Joseph planes and Mary weaves

I have thought of another rhyme for ‘child’. ‘Smiled’.

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After the end of Christmas, what next?

After all the excitement of Advent and Christmas and the special feasts afterwards, it can come as a slight surprise to find ourselves at the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time. Especially as it’s the Second Sunday. This is because the First Sunday is what is known in the trade as ‘perpetually impeded’ by the Feast of the Lord’s Baptism. You might ask why, if it’s perpetually impeded, the Church doesn’t renumber; you might well ask, but there isn’t an answer, so I just file it mentally with the fact the first verse of every psalm is v2 (because the title is v1, but we don’t actually have the titles….) and try not to get sidetracked.

Ordinary Time…for what?

So here we are in Ordinary Time. Some people in the Church do not like the expression, saying that no time is ordinary. They are right of course, but we do need a way to map our position in the year. Their preferred solution is to count forwards and backwards to the major feasts, which leads to those lovely poetic names we remember from childhood (Septuagesima, Sexagesima, Quinquagesima etc). However, this is opaque and simply confusing for most people, as it’s counting days not weeks (so Septuagesima is a reference to the number ‘seventy’, but is the name for the ninth Sunday before Easter, the third before Lent (and so on). The point about Ordinary Time is that it counts up from the Baptism of the Lord to Ash Wednesday, nice and simple (except it starts with ‘Second’). I hope this is now clear.

much easier, but still lots of information (Meier clock, Detroit)

When it happens (twice)

I like Ordinary Time. Birthdays and celebrations may be the peaks in our lives, but ordinary time is where we jog along in the normal way, finding unexpected pleasures, surprises or simple recurrences of things we’d forgotten. The Church gives us two chunks of it, the chunk between Christmas and Lent, and the chunk between Trinity and Advent. So the Church’s year runs like this :

Advent
Christmas, Epiphany, Baptism
Ordinary Time 1
Lent
Easter, Pentecost, Trinity
Ordinary Time 2

and back to the beginning again, with everything else tucked into place in the great wheel that keeps turning, so you can get on and off at any point, like one of the old (terrifying) paternoster lifts. (If you don’t know about these, here’s a link to a video of a brave American trying out the one in Prague’s Lucerna. The University of Sheffield also has one, but much bigger, and the video of that would really upset Volmar, who is claustrophobic and hates lifts, so I haven’t put that one in. )

Grow or shrink to fit

The advantage of Ordinary Time is that it is sufficiently flexible to cope with the variable date of Easter. There is a complicated formula (explanation here) for the date of Easter, which changes every year, so sometimes we need more Sundays because the gaps are bigger, or fewer because they are smaller. This year we have seven Sundays in Ordinary Time (only six really, because we start with Second) before Lent begins. Some years there are ‘as few as four’, says my missal helpfully. It can go up to as many as nine, though in ten years or so I haven’t needed to set 9 OTA or 9 OTB yet. (9 OTC is the psalm for SS Peter and Paul, and St Patrick, so we have that one already.)

Dragon with extra head on tail — counting forwards and backwards

Time and calendars

Church time is different from our usual calendar. It’s interesting to watch children beginning to grasp that you can actually have more than one calendar, because most adults don’t think about it much. The Church’s year is a helpful corrective, starting in Advent as it does, so a month or so ahead of the standard Julian calendar. Calendars turn out to be like languages, where once you learn a second one, the world opens up as you realise that a third, fourth or fifth is entirely possible, and wouldn’t even cover a decent chunk of the options. When we were living in Eastern Europe, the children were delighted to discover that this meant two options for Christmas, and Russia has all the fun of New New Year and Old New Year.

God makes time and people make calendars

It all helps to sharpen your perception of the arbitrariness of human calendars. Because apart from all the varying man-made calendars, there is what you might call ‘God’s time’ : the natural sequence of events which we don’t know, can’t affect, and tend to appreciate only after the event (plants growing, fruit ripening, babies choosing to arrive etc.). This is what is celebrated in that beautiful poem in Ecclesiastes 3, which unrolls like the chiming of a great clock : ‘a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to wail and a time to dance’ and so on. This is what it means when Psalm 1 talks about ‘due season’.

Have yourself a sultry little Christmas….

Talking of seasons, at least half the Church is in the southern hemisphere, so whenever there are nature references in the Gospels or in the Bible more generally, they are the wrong way up. I talked about this briefly the Christmas before last, and I promised Sherry to go into it a bit further, but haven’t got around to it until now. Of course it’s not as bad as it might be, because the Holy Land is much nearer to the Equator and the seasons there are flattened out, so that you are thinking in terms of the rains or the dry season rather than winter or summer. Weather events are mentioned in the Psalms (storms, hurricanes, raging winds, drought) much more than seasons or climate, because people were thinking in a more limited local context. That means that there are fewer clashes than you might expect. All the same, it is odd to have all the readings about Christmas when you are yourself feeling very warm; and the Advent readings begging for more rain are not comforting in early December, when you are walking home from church in the sleet.

Snow on snow on snow on snow

It’s the carols and Christmas poems that tend to make the difference in the weather more apparent, with all the references to snow and midwinter, T.S. Eliot, Robert Southey and so on, not the Bible. The emphasis in the Gospel narrative is more on the inconvenience of having to travel at that stage in a pregnancy than on how cold it was on the way. I’ve talked before about how all that snow is a cultural assumption, and how rare snow is in the Psalms. It must have been terrible this year to feel the mismatch between traditional (northern) Christmas carols, and the bushfires in Australia. Even in normal years, you feel the clash, and I know when we were in a country where Christmas fell in the summer, it took us a while to adjust; but I’m also sure that in time there will be lots of Christmas music and poems written by people for whom a warm Christmas is normal, and I look forward to reading and hearing more. Indeed, some of it is already coming through, like Christmas calypsos.

…can Spring be far behind?

But this is all looking backwards, and I wanted to talk about the upcoming weeks of Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time will take us from winter into the beginnings of spring. It’s a good crop of psalms, going from the lovely Samuel psalm (39/40, ‘Here I am, Lord, I come to do your will’, left open without a cadence, because it’s up to God what happens next), through gazing on loveliness (Ps 26/27) to the Presentation on February 2nd, which bumps 4 OTA. I need to blog about that psalm separately, because it is a major feast, which just happens to coincide with a Sunday this year. 5 OTA is about light, again (Ps 111/112), so in some ways throwing back to the Christmas imagery. 6 and 7 OTA are about the beauty and importance of the Law (Ps 118/119, the longest psalm of all, but we only sing a little bit of it; and Ps 102/103), well timed just before we arrive at Ash Wednesday on February 26th. So this session of Ordinary Time is quite brief, but has some jewels embedded in it. I have tried to set them so that they can sparkle.

Category: Psalms

Presentation/Candlemas : two feasts in one, and a palindromic date to match