What Did You See? (Mystagogy, Part 1)
It is now Eastertide. Our time is now ordered to the festive celebration of the Lord’s Resurrection. We have passed through our yearly remembrances of Holy Week and the Lord’s mighty acts for our salvation. It is the beginning of time for us each year, when we are reconstituted and refreshed as Christians and as a Church. The Lord has raised His Temple Body in three days, as He promised. He is raising us to new life with Him; we have received our life in Him again. We now await Pentecost and fresh consecration as the Church, the Tabernacle of God in this world. The Spirit of God will inaugurate that Temple’s works again and call us into them. In this time between Easter and Pentecost, it has been the habit of the Church for centuries to instruct the faithful—and especially the newly-baptized—in the meaning of the sacramental life they have received and the ends for which that life is purposed. This is mystagogy: an attentive journey through the mysteries of the Faith.
One of the most frequent comments I receive from visitors is about the multisensory quality of our worship. The Liturgy mediates an encounter with God in the fellowship of His people; it communicates grace and truth in a dense and elegant way. There is always more happening in the Liturgy than we are aware of, but the Liturgy is an encounter with Immanuel, God with us, and so our lack of vision does not stop Him from drawing near. The Liturgy engages all of the senses; it is an immersive experience that draws us together, body and soul, individually and collectively. The content of our liturgies as Christians, as human beings, reveals who we believe God to be and who we are in His service. A liturgy that omits some basic part of us calls into question whether there is something extraneous to us. For example, a liturgy that addresses us audibly but not visually calls into question the place of the eyes—whether God can meet us visually or whether our sight is relevant to our worship. Or take, perhaps, a liturgy that engages us emotionally but not thoughtfully (or vice versa): what does that suggest about the place of the head or the heart?
From the beginning, the shape of Christian worship has called upon all of who we are into the service of God. This is why the Liturgy is so multisensory. As a former classroom teacher, I was frequently presented with the data concerning learning modes, and the educational importance of teaching strategies that engaged multiple intelligences and capacities. The manner in which something is taught is part of the content of what is taught. There is a blurry line between what we call pedagogy and curriculum. Or, as a mentor once said of the ways we communicate the Gospel: “What you convert them with, you convert them to.” Over the next few blog posts, we will practice that mystagogy together, with special attention to what we just experienced in the Holy Week liturgies and how that encounter recreates and reorients our lives as Christians.
What did we see? Holy Week knows some of the most visually-engaging and emblematic moments of the Church year. One of the iconic sights of Holy Week comes with the Easter Vigil: the lighting and procession of the Paschal candle. It is right to begin our mystagogy with this sight. As the Psalmist writes, “In Your light will we see light.” It is by this light that we begin to see everything else.
We begin in the darkness. The official ‘time’ of the Vigil is sunset, whenever that might be. After we conclude with Evening Prayer on Holy Saturday, after all that is needed for the Vigil is in place, our task is to wait until the world’s light grows dark. We do not enter the church but gather in that outer darkness. As night falls, a fire is lit, struck by the flint stone and kindled to gather all those standing in darkness to its warmth and light. The fire itself is like any fire in the world: it is the element by which we have warmed, illuminated, and fed ourselves for untold generations. It is the element that, as those before us believed, was a symbol of the divine because no matter how it was situated it always burned upward toward the heavens. Fire makes us look at its light and then directs our vision upward.
The fire is blessed beyond its purpose of light and warmth to serve the end of illuminating the church again after it had been left in darkness since the hour Christ died on Good Friday. The Paschal candle is then brought out. The candle itself, as we sing in the Exultet, is the work of the bees, God’s creatures, whose melting wax feeds the flame. It is the work of the creation molded by human hands as an offering and place for the fire to become candle-flame. The candle is blessed to bear that holy fire, a fire that no longer will burn erratically but steadily as a sign of God’s powerful but steady presence. This candle is the beginning of the use of all candles in the church. Wherever we find them, it is an image of God with us, of making His tabernacle among us.
On the Paschal candle are markings. There is the sign of the Cross, with five pins placed through five pieces of incense and stuck into the points of the Cross where they passed through the Body of our Lord. The candle bears the sign of Christ’s glorious wounds, by which He offered Himself as a prayer to the Father to obtain life for the whole world. Around this Cross are the numbers indicating the current year, which is always the year of our Lord. On either side of this Cross and the year are the Greek letters ‘alpha’ and ‘omega’ to proclaim with the words of the candle liturgy that “His are all times and all seasons.” The holy fire is then bestowed upon the candle to inaugurate and consecrate it. It is an image of Christ in His Baptism when the Spirit descended; it is a sign of what is soon to come for all those baptized into Him that night as they, too, are prepared to become the place where the Spirit will come to dwell.
With the candle lit, we enter the darkness of the church-space while the congregation waits in darkness. Then, they see a great light and the deacon thrice proclaims: “The Light of Christ! Thanks be to God!” From that candle, the candles of all the faithful present are lit. The cold darkness is transfigured into a warm glow. When the light has gone out from Christ to illuminate each person, the deacon proclaims the Exultet to the whole Creation: “Rejoice now all ye heavenly legions of angels and all high things that pass understanding … sing with joy, O Earth, illumined with this celestial radiancy!” The light is given to invite our worship. The moment it is lit, we are able to pray in the church again. We are able to see by its glow how the church has already been transfigured as well. The light reveals how the veils around our Lord have been removed, how the altar has been adorned with its splendor, how the sanctuary has become a fertile garden filled with lilies—the flower of Resurrection. In that light, we begin to see light.
The Paschal candle keeps watch over the Liturgy of the Vigil. In an older time, its light and the little lights it kindled would be the only light in the church, by which the Lessons would be read, by which the faithful would see as the church was brought to life again. If you were outside in the darkness, you would see through the windows a light that came from within every church. You would know what St. John means when he wrote in his prologue: “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it.” Light attends the Word. The Paschal light illuminates the reading of the Scriptures, the recitation of the Psalms. Light and Word commingle in that space; we begin to remember who we are and the purpose of the place we have gathered. Everything is coming back to life again even as the Vigil Lessons restore us to ourselves.
After it has led us to the church and illuminated the reading of the Scriptures to instruct us, though, the light of the Paschal candle then leads us to the Baptismal Font. The light of the candle presides over the blessing of the Font; it is dipped into the waters to signify the Holy Spirit who comes to give the life of Christ to all who come to those waters. It is the sign that Christ Himself is the Minister who baptizes all through the hands of His ministers. He is the One who draws all across the threshold into the Church, His Body. It is there that those who have been under instruction are brought into the Church; it is the time of the year when we all renew our baptismal vows and promise again to follow Christ. To each of the newly baptized we give a candle that is lit from the Paschal candle as a little flame from that greater light. The light of Christ, as St. John writes again: “That was the true light that gives light to every man who comes into the world.”
As the candle leads us from the Font into the church, from it all the altar lights are then lit. From the Paschal candle the light for the Eucharist is bestowed; it lights our way to Holy Communion. As the light entered and illuminated the darkness of the church, as it signified Christ coming to His people who sat in darkness and the shadow of death, so now that light signifies His coming to each of us in the Sacrament to lighten our darkness, to turn our night into day, to search us out and know us. When Holy Communion is concluded, it is the flame that lights the sanctuary lamp as the Sacrament is reserved in the tabernacle of the altar—Christ has not come and gone. Christ is with us unto the end.
As the light of Easter morning dawns, the Paschal candle remains lit. It is no mere instrument to illuminate the darkness of nighttime. To Christ belong all times and seasons. The Paschal candle remains lit through the daytime as well to signify the supremacy of the risen Christ over all celestial bodies, even the sun. He is that true light beyond all other lights. The Paschal candle remains in the sanctuary until the Ascension as a visible symbol of the resurrected Lord’s bodily presence among His disciples for those forty days. But even after He was taken into the heavens to sit on His throne, the light that burns constantly in the church from the sanctuary remains that very fire lit on Easter eve. It is passed every week from candle to candle. Each Sunday becomes a little Easter.
As we sing in the Exultet: “The mystery, therefore of this most holy night putteth to flight the deeds of darkness, purgeth away sin, restoreth innocence to the fallen and gladness unto them that mourn, casteth out hatred, bringeth peace to all mankind, and boweth down mighty princes … We beseech Thee, therefore, O Most Merciful, that this candle which we have lighted and consecrated before Thee in Thine own Name, may continue to shine forth without ceasing, and may vanquish all the deeds of darkness!”