About the year 380, a woman named Egeria traveled from Spain to the east, visiting Egypt and the Sinai, Palestine and the Land Between the Rivers, and Constantinople, writing an account of what she saw at each place. Egeria was a Christian, and she was particularly interested in the holy sites and in the manner of worship she encountered. She had a knack for the travelogue, and a heart for the faith. She was in Jerusalem on February 2, 382, when the Feast of the Presentation was held at what was called “the Anastasis,” that is, the Church of the Resurrection, built upon the site of the Holy Sepulcher. February 2 is the fortieth day after the Nativity, and that is when, according to the law of Moses, a woman who had given birth to a son was to go to the Temple to make an offering of ritual purification. This day in Jerusalem, Egeria says, “is undoubtedly celebrated here with the very highest honor, for on that day there is a procession, in which all take part, in the Anastasis, and all things are done in their order with the greatest joy, just as at Easter. All the priests, and after them the bishop, preach, always taking for their subject that part of the Gospel where Joseph and Mary brought the Lord into the Temple on the fortieth day, and Simeon and Anna the prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, saw Him, treating of the words which they spoke when they saw the Lord.” Just as at Easter — think of yet another day of joy, still in the shadow of winter!
Our Word of the Week is candle, in honor of the Feast of the Presentation, which came to be called, in English, Candlemas, because it was celebrated with a candlelight procession. This was so everywhere in Europe, as you can gather by the name: it is Candelora in Italy, Candelaria in Spain, Lichtmess (Mass of Light) in Germany, and so on. In the East, though, what’s emphasized is the meeting of Old and New, because Jesus is Himself the new Temple, as he says; and that meeting is highlighted by the aged Simeon and Anna, waiting in the Temple for many years, and now seeing the child for whom they were waiting. So in Russian the feast is called Sretenye, that is, the Feast of the Encounter.
Pope Gelasius (r. 492-496), as tradition has it, served pancakes on the Feast of the Purification, because their shape and their golden color suggested the returning sun and its light. I’ll gladly eat pancakes any day, but with an addition my Italian cousins don’t know about. One time, a young Italian scholar came to visit me in Rhode Island, and I told him I’d take him out to lunch at a typical American diner. There one of us had the best thing to be gotten in such a place — I mean of course breakfast for lunch, which in my case meant pancakes and sausages, with maple syrup. “It’s made out of the sap from a maple tree!” I said. He looked at me suspiciously. “Go ahead,” I said, “try it. I can’t describe the flavor.” He did, and he liked it very much.
As you may know, I grew up in Pennsylvania, where the Germans brought their pancakes, and where they also brought a tradition regarding February 2. Now, Americans didn’t make it up, and it wasn’t even peculiar to the Germans. In Italy, they say about February 2, that it predicts the winter. There’s a rhyme that says this: “If you see a little rain, winter is done with, but if the sun is clear, March will be like January!” But in Romagna, north of Tuscany, they say, in a dialect that makes my eyes glaze over, “Se piov per Zariola, quaranta de l’inveran in z’arnova,” “If it rains on Candelmas, you’ll have forty more days of winter.” Anyhow, the more common folk wisdom all over Europe agrees with the first and not with the Romagnoli. And that’s why the ground hog in Pennsylvania, out west in Punxsutawney, is ceremoniously brought out every February 2 to see his shadow. If he does, it means six more weeks of winter — another forty days, just as it’s forty days from Christmas to the Feast of the Presentation. That would take you to the middle of March, well into the shades of Lent. But if he doesn’t, then winter is going to be soon gone. His name, by the way, is Phil — Punxsutawney Phil, and he’s been making these predictions since the late 1800’s, which would make him a very old ground hog indeed, unless, of course, the mayor and the town council have been putting up Phil’s great-great-great-great ground-piglets, no doubt endowed with the same gift of prophecy.
The word candle comes to us almost unchanged from Old English candel, itself a loan word from Latin candela. Had it been Germanic, and related to candela, it would have begun with h-; think of Latin canis, but English hound. Had it come to us in Middle English through the Normans and their French, it would have begun with ch-; think of Latin cantare, but French chanter, from which we get English chant. So it came in straight from Latin, because the people who brought the faith wrote Latin and spoke it in their prayers at Mass, whether they were Irish or German or Roman. But candle did after all make an appearance in English through the French, and that’s why we have a chandelier, which is that fancy candle-holder hanging from the ceiling, and if your last name is Chandler, it may be that some distant ancestor of yours made and sold candles for a living. Later on, though, a chandler was just somebody who sold a general run of goods: hence the unctuous humbug Uncle Pumblechook, in Dickens’ Great Expectations, is a “corn chandler,” a grain and seed man, I guess. But I like the association with candles better.
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