Sometimes we need to forget our pretence to uniqueness, and look for our salvation and our purpose in the ordinary and the mundane.

Unique?...

...or ordinary?

 

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In their new film Revolutionary Road, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio play April and Frank Wheeler, an unhappily married couple. The unhappiness, which sooner or later will lead to death and destruction, has its origins in a shocking realisation: April and Frank aren’t special. They are not different, rather they are exactly like everyone else, indistinguishable from the common herd. As April says: “Frank knows what he wants, he found his place, he’s just fine. Married, two kids, it should be enough. It is for him. And he’s right; we were never special or destined for anything at all.”

No wonder April and Frank are driven into a self-destructive mode. This is a fundamentally unorthodox admittance. We live in a society in which everyone is different, everyone is special, like a multinational version of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average”. It seems that this is the only way we can bear to live our lives, to think that we are some unique. When the realisation comes that we are just the same, there is no alternative to nihilism.

Today is the feast of the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple: Candlemas in the Western Church, Hypapante in the Greek Orthodox church, the day of Encounter with the infant Christ. In Luke’s account we hear how Mary and Joseph went up to the Temple in Jerusalem to perform the necessary rites:

When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord, ‘Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord’), and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, ‘a pair of turtle-doves or two young pigeons.’ Luke 2:22-24

Luke clear the important idea by repeating it three times: “according to the law of Moses”; “as it is written in the law of the Lord”; “according to what is stated in the law of the Lord”. This was the“done” thing, the usual thing, the ordinary thing to do. Mary and Joseph were being conventional. Neither were Simeon and Anna doing anything extraordinary that day either.  As Luke tells us the two spent all their time in the Temple, looking for the consolation of Israel. Luke 2.25

Four people following the ordinary and the customary. And then the extraordinary happens. Simeon sees that this is the moment promised to him by God:

“Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation”.

Here is the significance of Candlemas: here we see another story of the encounter between the human and the divine, in the meeting of the ordinary and the extraordinary, in the things of this world and the things of heaven. This is the reason why the Orthodox name for the day is such a good one, Hypapante, the day of Encounter. When we encounter Christ on Candlemas we have a chance to recognise that our salvation, our glory and our freedom, will be found in the most ordinary moments of our lives — not because we are extraordinary characters who obviously deserve such wonders, but because we worship a God who loves us so much that he brings all the wonders of the heavens down to us, and gives them to us in the face and love of his Son.

A thousand years ago, a father of the Church described the meaning of Candlemas in this way:

Come to him and be enlightened that you do not so much bear lamps as become them, shining within yourselves and radiating light to your neighbours¹

1. ‘Sermon for Candlemas’ by Guerric of Igny, 1070-1157, in Liturgical sermons Vol 1 Introduction  and translation by monks of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey (Spencer, Mass., Cistercian Publications, 1970) [↩]