Votive Candles and Prayer

FEBRUARY, 2005

VOTIVE CANDLES AND PRAYER

Just in time for Ash Wednesday, Bill and Maryann McIntyre delivered the votive candle table Bill has been working on for weeks. It is unique, impressive, and beautiful, made especially for the space it will occupy in our chapel, with space for communion oblations as well as the candles. (There is also a small slot to receive your monetary gifts, to defray the cost of candles in the church.) And so, another archaic yet timeless spiritual practice returns to our worship space—the opportunity to light a candle as prayer, for petition, intercession, or thanksgiving.

The Protestant reformers were fixated upon words. Gutenberg started it, by printing the Bible, the chief icon of Protestantism, so that that great repository of words could be placed in the hands of all people. Sermons also became long barrages of words; even our Prayer Book is all about language. Words branded all other means of communication as “superstition,” and drove them out of the Church. For a long time, words have reigned triumphant. Perhaps we finally reached the limit of their ability to communicate truth, and at that boundary we re-encountered what always lay at the very heart of religious faith—mystery.

Mystery cannot be expressed in words. Neither can every prayer.

The Incarnation reminds us that words can become flesh, or matter. We can communicate through scent, and color, and movement, and taste. We can communicate through darkness, and through light.

To light a candle as part of your devotions is not superstitious, but prayerful. Your words are heard only for a moment, then they cease. But not your prayer. It rises from your heart, not from your lips. The flame and the delicate plume of smoke which rise from the candle remind you of your prayer—so frail, and yet so bold, so small and yet so bright. You turn and go about the activity of your day. But the desire of your heart burns on like the flame in the glass.