A Candlemas Carol

Candlemas has come (okay, it was 2^nd February, which was last Wednesday), and Christmas is definitely over.  The last holly leaves are in the compost bin (reminding me that it’s high time I scrape up the dead deciduous leaves that are all over the garden and decide whether I’m actually going to do any gardening this year).  The Christmas tree, of course, went back into the garden on Twelfth Night, as twelve days inside a warm dry house is as much as a little spruce tree can be expected to put up with.  This one has managed to survive four Christmases so far – and, more importantly, survived the summers between them.

The Christmas cards have gone to the recycling bin, except one from a friend in Wales that didn’t arrive until 1^st February, and which I’m going to keep.  Apart from anything else, you don’t often get a Christmas card with a dragon on it.

The wooden cross that the holly wreath came wrapped around is standing proudly on the mantelpiece.  Even wrapped in holly, it was never just a secular ornament to me, with its overtones of the Sans Day Carol.  But, stripped of its leaves, it stands starkly, a reminder to move on from the baby in the manger to the man who died on the cross and who rose from the dead.

I am not good at festivals.  My paranoia about religion always comes to the fore at Christmas and Easter, with anxieties over whether Jesus’s birth and his resurrection are truly the good news that they appear to be, or a harbinger of something terrifying.  Sometimes, the Cthulu mythos parodies of well-loved carols that PDB11 and Doom Metal Singer laugh over, like this one here, seem uncomfortably close to how I feel.

In fact, I had been getting so erratic in Advent, picking arguments with the vicar after his sermons and refusing to listen to anything he said in reply to my questions, that he had to ask me not to come to the busiest Christmas services, and not to talk to him at the ones I did attend.  After all, children and people who only attended church at Christmas would hardly be in a position to enjoy the service if I was freaking out.

Of all the Cthulu mythos Christmas song parodies that Doom Metal Singer and I were listening to, the one that spoke to me the most was All I Want For Solstice Is My Sanity.  That was definitely what I wished for.  And even if I didn’t quite manage to have a happy Solstice, I have been managing to stay reasonably calm and stable over January. 

The fact that, at the Candlemas service, the vicar actually allowed me to offer an answer to his question ‘Why have we just sung Angels from the Realms of Glory in February?’ was a sign of how much more confident he feels about having me around, now that I’m behaving better.  (If you’re not sure of the answer, listen to the carol, then bear in mind that Candlemas is the festival that celebrates the events of Luke 2:22-38.)

But with Candlemas we not only leave Christmas behind, but look forward to Lent and Easter.  Now, I don’t mind traditions like giving something up for Lent, or even for Advent.  Once when I was working in a care home, I gave up sweets for Advent out of self-defence, because so many patients’ relatives gave the carers boxes of chocolates, biscuits and mince pies in the run-up to Christmas that if I had allowed myself to sample them, I would never have stopped stuffing myself.  And not eating mince pies throughout December made the feasting of Christmas something to look forward to.

In the past few years, PDB11 and I have found that if we tried going vegetarian or giving up car use for Lent, it became so much of a habit by Easter that afterwards we might go back to, say, only eating meat occasionally, or only using the car if it really wasn’t feasible to walk or catch the bus.

But, of course, giving things up isn’t what Lent is about, any more than Easter is about eating chocolate. The point of giving up distractions is to focus on drawing closer to God.  ‘Through fasting, prayer, and acts of service, You draw us back to Your generous heart,’ the liturgy says. 

This is fine if you have a fairly sane idea of what God is like, who Jesus was, and what he came for.  But as I don’t, it’s a toss-up whether spending more time playing hymns, praying, reading the Bible, and thinking about Jesus, will lead me to greater insights or just make me panic.  Frequently, what it leads to is several hours’ row with PDB11 which, when we get tired of shouting, eventually leads to insight – but by then we’re too tired to write it down.

Fasting isn’t a fail-safe route to holiness.  I’ve seen some people advocate it on the basis that ‘If you can control even your body’s desire to eat, you can control everything about yourself.’  But this is plainly not true (consider anorexia patients who can’t overcome the compulsion to refuse to eat), and not scriptural (the point of the Bible’s story about Jesus’s temptation in the desert is that he was vulnerable to temptation because he hadn’t eaten for weeks). 

From my own experience, I know that I become more bad-tempered and irrational when I’m hungry.  Even giving up drinking tea can knock me off-balance.  And yes, I know that means I’m dependent on tea and probably should try to break my addiction – but I’d prefer to wait until I’ve got some of my other problems under control first.

Acts of service look a bit more promising.  I haven’t been doing any official voluntary work (such as helping in charity shops) since the first lockdown in 2020, and maybe it’s time to get back into that, but I can see more direct ways to make a difference, closer to home.  I probably ought to take up going on litter-picking walks, considering the detritus of discarded bottles, cans, car hubcaps, bath-towels and socks that I frequently encounter when out walking.

But when it comes to walking – I really, really like the idea that any walk can be a pilgrimage.  Going out for walks with a friend who is trying to get fit probably even counts as an act of service.  Going out for an all-day walk on my own gives PDB11 some space to do music practice or use power tools without worrying that he’s disturbing my writing or my meditation, so this probably counts as an act of service, too.  But this is a subject for another post.