I guess I am not alone in finding February a very unfavourite month! By the time we get to February, it feels as uif winter will never end. Certainly, the days are getting a bit longer. But February is often a month of dark skies, cold and sometimes snow. And by now our resistance is low. We have endured three months or so of winter and we feel we have had enough.
The Catholic Church has a rather keen sense of how we feel at different points of the year. The Church is sympathetic to our human feelings and provides some appropriate Feast Days to cheer us up in the winter months. Some of these Feasts are of course also celebrated by many other Christian Communities. Just as the worst of winter is beginning, there is the Feast of all Saints on November 1st. This Feast is a Feast of Light – the light of God's grace shining out in the faces of his holy ones, whom we honour on this day. Then there is Christmas, the supreme mid-winter Feast of Light.
And now once more, as we battle though to the end of the winter, there is the Feast we call 'Candlemass'. This is on February 2nd. It is the celebration of Jesus being presented by Mary and Joseph to his heavenly Father in the Temple in Jerusalem. The old man Simeon receives the Christ Child into his arms and proclaims him to be 'A light to enlighten the Gentiles'. In Catholic churches on this day, we bless candles and light them up as Mass begins. We process with lighted candles round the church as Mass begins. And we light the candles again and hold them up as the Gospel story is read.
What we are doing on all these Feasts is not mere 'outward show'. It is the way we celebrate a deep, inward truth: God has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Father Denys Lloyd
Parish Priest of the Parish of Our Lady and St Joseph, Sheringham and Cromer.
FAITH IN THE STARS - OR IN GOD?
These days not many people go to church on Sundays. But millions love to listen to fortune tellers! Pages and pages of magazines are given over to horoscopes. If you go into almost any bookshop, you find whole sections given over to 'New Age' books - books on astrology - books on the occult - books on all kinds of strange cults and even witch-craft.
What is all this about? It surely means that people in general are not out-and-out atheists. Not many people go to church. But for many people 'religion' has a great fascination - so long, it seems, as it is not Christianity.
This fascination with predicting the future, obtaining the secrets of the universe and getting a grip on the 'spirit world' is not something new. Magic in one form or another has been an obsession with many people down the ages. But again and again the Bible tells us this is not the way to run one's life.
The Feast of the Epiphany that the Church keeps at the beginning of January tells us about the 'Magi' ('Magicians') coming to worship Jesus. And when the Magi reached Bethlehem, so St Matthew tells us in his Gospel, they renounced their past errors. Frankincense and myrrh were both used in the practice of the magic arts in the time of Jesus. But now, faced with the Infant Saviour, the Magi offered worship to him, the true God. They surrendered to him the tools of their magical trade (frankincense and myrrh) and their ill-gotten gains (gold). So ends the Christmas story - with a call to us to do what the Magi did: turn from the darkness of superstition to the light of Christ!
Father Denys Lloyd
Parish Priest of the Parish of Our Lady and St Joseph, Sheringham and Cromer.