Templar Edification

40 days after the birth of Jesus Christ, the Church celebrates an oft-overlooked holiday that goes by many names. For Protestants, it is the Presentation of Our Lord. Catholics call it the Purification of the Blessed Virgin. For the Orthodox, it is simply Hypapante, “the Meeting.” Yet I confess my own preference for the Anglican name: Candlemas. We find the story of Candlemas in the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel, concluding that early section of canticles we sometimes call Luke: The Musical. 40 days after childbirth complete Mary’s period of ritual cleansing according to the Law of Moses. She may now travel to the Temple in Jerusalem in order to redeem Jesus as her firstborn Son. This harkens back to the tale of the Exodus, when God claimed the firstborn of Israel as His own, be they man or beast—“the males that first open the womb.” The number 40 always carries symbolic importance in the Scriptures; ancient peoples knew that it takes roughly 40 weeks for a pregnant woman to come to ...

On the evening of 29 September every year, I light a fire in a rough-hewn shelter in the woods, and there my congregation and I celebrate Michaelmas, the Feast of St Michael and all angels. I confess it's one of my favorite pastoral traditions: the crackle of the leaves, the bite in the air, the sparks dancing upward from firelight to starlight. It is an ethereal time, when one can just begin to glimpse the form of things unseen. I have a special devotion to St Michael. I wear his image on a little silver shield about my neck, which I never take off. There he is, complete with flaming sword and leaf-shaped shield, in splendid Roman armor. And just as my shield bears his image, so his bears the image of the Cross. It is a reminder that no matter what forces may array themselves against us, the light of a single candle puts all the powers of darkness to flight. Put now out of mind the Precious Moments figures, the faeries with feathery wing. The angels of the Bible appear as giants a...