Candlemas, Saint Brigid, and the Light of True Faith

Today, the Catholic Church celebrates the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, known in English-speaking countries as "Candlemas" for the tradition of blessing candles on this day. Yesterday, she celebrated the Feast of Saint Brigid of Kildare, one of the patrons of Ireland. These two feasts, which occur within a day of each other, speak to the great Christian theme of meeting and parting, of assimilation and rejection, in short, of Incarnation.

Last October, I wrote of the pagan origins of All Saints' Day in the Irish harvest festival of Samhain. I wrote of how the Church affirms and assimilates all that is good and true and beautiful in every culture with which it comes into contact. But if this principal, called "inculturation" be true, it necessarily posits a corollary: the Church emphatically rejects all that is not good and true and beautiful in a culture.

Thus, even as the the Christian missionaries to Ireland affirmed the people's veneration for motherhood and fertility in the cult of the goddess Brigid, they insisted that there is only one God, not many, and He is not a mother, but the Creator of motherhood. It is appropriate, therefore, that Saint Brigid, foundress of one of Ireland's most ancient monasteries, shares a name with the old goddess. For Brigid was a mother to the community of which she was abbess, having influence over even bishops and chieftains, a patroness of literature and the arts, and a revered spiritual teacher. It is also appropriate that her feast (February 1) falls on the same day as the festival of the old goddess (Imbolc), for the cult of the saint replaces that of the goddess; the shadows of superstition are replaced by the pure light of Faith. Brigid, like all the great saints, is a light that points beyond herself to a higher Light.

This Light is the "light to the nations" (Luke 2:32) that the prophet Simeon greeted in the Temple. This Light is the Son of God who became like man in all things, except sin. Here again, in the person of Jesus Christ, we see the theme of assimilation and rejection. For Christ, possessive of a divine nature, takes upon Himself a human nature. He assimilates everything that is good and true and beautiful in human nature, while emphatically rejecting that which is not, namely sin.

So let us not confuse true religion with false religion, as if it were all-of-a-piece. There are many points of contact between Christianity and the many cults of the world, and these should be celebrated. But when God becomes man in the person of Jesus Christ, something occurs that is genuinely new and unique in the history of mankind. And this Jesus Christ compels a choice; He "calls us out of darkness and into his own marvelous light" (1 Pet 2:9).

St. Brigid of Kildare, show us the light of true Faith!

Happy Halloween/Oiche Shamhna

I love Halloween. I always have. I love dressing up, telling ghost stories and watching horror movies, visiting haunted houses. Further, I think that there is something very psychologically and spiritually healthy about taking a long, hard look at evil and death, and even having a laugh at their expense. As C.S. Lewis said, "The devil cannot stand to be mocked." Here is a levity that comes from the Christian consciousness that evil and death no longer have any power over us.

Still, I recognize that Halloween is the object of no small amount of criticism in Christian circles, particularly in more fundamentalist circles. These generally well-intentioned Christians frequently (and often accurately) cite the pagan origins of Halloween, especially in the Irish harvest festival of Samhain (pronounced SOW-in). They say that such pre-Christian observances have no place in Christian life, that they are at best syncratistic, at worst idolatrous.

But what, historically, has been the Church's attitude toward pre-Christian cultures? What has been her missionary philosophy? Our modern term inculturation describes this ancient phenomenon aptly. Inculturation is the principle by which Christian missionaries affirm all that is good and true and beautiful in a culture, and reconcile it to the Christian faith. One recalls especially the great Jesuit missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, priests like Matteo Ricci, who so insinuated himself into Chinese culture as to become Chinese himself. He donned the garb of a Mandarin scholar, and so impressed the Imperial Court with his knowledge of astronomy and mathematics that he was able to convert a good number of them to Christ.

At the basis of the inculturation principle is the assumption that one can be fully Irish or Chinese or whatever AND fully Christian. After all, if Christ could be fully divine and fully human, so also could Ricci's converts be fully Christian and fully Chinese.

Which brings us back to Halloween/Samhain. The missionaries that first preached the Gospel to the Irish knew intuitively that they could not simply level Irish culture and build Christian culture atop it. Beyond being impractical, it is simply impossible, since Christian culture as such does not exist. Rather, they affirmed and reconciled Irish culture to Christian faith. The festival of Samhain was not only a harvest festival, but also a festival of the dead, a time when the spirit world was considered particularly close to our own. Christian missionaries recognized in this belief a shadow of the Christian belief in the communion of the saints, the connectedness of all who have died in Christ. Largely due to the experience of the Irish missionaries, Pope Gregory III (d. 741) fixed the date for the Feast of All Saints (or "All Hallows") on November 1.

Centuries later, Halloween/Samhain remains a festival in which we recall the reality and the imminence of the spirit world, in which we laugh at the devil and laugh with the saints, when we honor the God who reconciles all peoples and cultures to Himself, who has destroyed death and darkness forever.