Month: July 2021

Lighting a candle

A friend once sent me a card of the Upper Basilica of St Clement in Rome: ‘James, I lit a candle and said a prayer for you here.’ 

Lighting a candle in church is an act of poetry as well as piety. Electric candles are not the same. They do not have that quality of a wax candle which diminishes even as its flame stretches upwards, so that, in giving light, it is at the same time disappearing. The candle is a living, vibrant presence. When we leave a church, we know that, as the candle we lit dies down, it will be replaced by other candles and other flames, just as other prayers will be added to ours.

All over the world people are coming and going in churches and temples, lighting candles and votive lamps, and saying prayers. We think of the tongues of fire at Pentecost and are reminded of how, now more than ever perhaps, people long to be set on fire and inspired. As we read in the Book of Esdras, ‘I shall light a candle of understanding in thine heart, which shall not be put out.’

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Becoming

We all travel two paths: an outer path which involves certain goals such as the exercise of ambition and commitment to a task; and an interior path. All too often the pressures of the first can result in a failure to nurture the inner self, with the result that, on reaching a peak of outward success, some people feel an emptiness within themselves. 

I think often of a remark made by Joyce Grenfell during one of her lunchtime dialogues at St Mary-le-Bow in London: ‘I am less and less interested in being Joyce Grenfell the performer,’ she said, ‘and more and more in becoming the person God meant me to be.’ It is only when we are still, when we have learned to listen to the promptings of the heart, of that still small voice within each of us, that we begin to perceive who we are meant to be.

Personal note from James:

For those who may read these blogs and who are in their ninth or tenth decade (I am in the latter). If when meditating you find you fall fast  asleep, don’t worry! Such a sleep is often very deep and healing. Regard it as a gift! In the late 1970s when I was at Glasshampton Monastery in Worcestershire, preparing for ordination, I would spend three or four hours each evening in the chapel in silent meditation. My only other  companion was Brother David, then aged 80,  who had been the first Provincial Minister of the Society of St.Francis. He would sit in his  pew wrapped in a plaid shawl given him by a Scottish shepherd, while I would sit at the back of the chapel. Sometimes I observed he fell fast asleep, but always there was such a stillness about him. Whether we are awake or asleep we are always in the Presence. Accept what comes as a gift from the beyond!

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