The Candle of Joy

The altar designed by French artist and designer Guillaume Bardet is seen in the heart of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral Stephane de Sakutin/AP

I went to Mass today. After decades. It was an emotional return. Unexpected. To me at least. This is the beginning of a Nativity Novena. For the next 10 days, I will attend a candle lit mass before dawn. A discipline to prepare my heart for Christmas. The church I attended is a sweet little Catholic Church called St. John the Evangelist just up the road. It is old world Catholic, with statues, icons, and chanting and incense. As soon as the scent of frankincense reached me, I was transported. Transported back to my roots. A long shut door opened. Something ancient in me awakened and I felt sanctified and purified. Over the cadence of the family in front of me leading us all in the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, the hum of the penitents making Confession, the restlessness of the children on laps, and the heavy creak and thud of the door opening and closing to the world as the congregation arrived for Sunday Mass, I felt embraced in a stillness I have not felt in a long long time. I breathed deeply. I wept softly.

What prompted this return was a reader of my last blog who voiced surprise that I was not a practising Catholic. The reflections she shared had me reconsider the Faith. I have had a hard time with the Latin Church. So many abuses. So very many accommodations to the Spirit of the Times which too often eclipses the Spirit of the Depths. Guitar choirs and social justice campaigns feed my heart, but not my soul. I am left hungry. I am left thirsty. I do not want my Church to mirror or entrain to contemporary madness. I think I have always wanted a Church to stand apart. To offer something of the other world that my bones re-member. I want to stand and kneel and sit in that extravagant beauty which transcends the misery and the ugliness of our times. I have convinced myself for decades that I could find this beauty in nature. And, to a certain extent I can. Yet, glimpsing the pictures this week of the restored Notre Dame Cathedral in France, touched me deeply and reminded me that my soul beats Catholic. We are made of stardust and wounds. A priest I listened to on a podcast this week said the most important prayer we can make is to endure ourselves. To be humble enough to see the self inflicted wounds and still look up. Endure.

I wept openly when Notre Dame burned in 2019. I wept again last week to see it restored to glory. Nature has splendour and beauty, but what can be created with human hands worshipping the Unseen is both humbling and exultant. Wounds and stardust. There is some debate about the new altar in the restored Notre Dame. It is bowl like in design. Not four pillared and solid on the earth, but surprisingly and unexpectedly, rounded and womb like. The surface maintains the four cardinal directions, but in approach, the new altar is starkly different in its simplicity. My first response was irritation. It didn’t belong. It was too modern. It did not blend in with the Gothic and baroque finishings. It stands out. It is wildly dissonant.

The image stayed with me and had its way with me. It is forcing me to wrestle with the new, the strange, the alien. The longer I meditate on the image, the more I began to notice resonance. The new altar and its echo in the Baptismal Font are unapologetically feminine. We are told that the Church itself is the feminine. It holds the Spirit of God and Christ and gathers us in. Like Mary. Like Notre Dame which translates to Our Lady. Mother Church has been so sorely injured. Her wounds are great. And now, rather than a square or rectangle altar, we are gathered around a bowl. A vessel. I am still wrestling to reconcile myself to the image. In this holiest of places, the altar, the image has been altered. Changed. Made modern. Minimalist. Dissonant to so much that surrounds it. The dissonance will not let me go. Is this "an alchemical symbol of a union of unlike substances; a marrying of the OPPOSITES in an intercourse which has as its fruition the birth of a new element? Does the new altar evoke the archetype of emergence itself? Emergence on the altar of sacrifice? The convergence of the past and the present whispering of a new future? We do need a new future. I do. In my heart. In my Church. In my world.

The Mass I attended this morning was a sung mass. Lots of the Latin was preserved. The ornate vestments, the sconced candles, the metered chanting, the wafting incense, the communal prayers and songs reached deeply into the remote past. Yet, here we were. In 2024 leaning into 2025.

Take and eat, this is my body. Take and drink, this is my blood: hoc est corpus meum, hic est sanguis meus. When I knelt at the altar, with an elder on each side of me, offering my tongue to the host, the meaning of sacrifice was made profoundly manifest. Something deep was touched. I merely sacrificed a Sunday morning, the elders on each side of me likely sacrificed a life time, and as we all sacrificed our knees to kneel, we became the Body of Christ. We shared Communion. Joy descended. Something of heaven touched earth. Amen!

Maybe most of you readers could predict that this might be where I would end up. Conversions and religious returns in the West are exponentially startling. Why are the faithful turning to Church? Some suggest that the CoVid years and the side effect on relatedness is in part responsible. Maybe. Maybe it is because the reality of death that CoVid amplified. Maybe the promises of modernity and science were shaken or broken. Maybe the meaning crisis is tolling deeper than the political, social, or environmental alarms. Maybe our psychologies have not looked high enough. What I do know is this. We cannot live without Joy. This is not hedonistic pleasure seeking. This is not temporal. Joy is eternal. The biblical corpus defines it very differently than the culture. To live in joy is to live for something greater than our needs or desires. To Live in Faith. To be oriented toward something so much greater than ourselves.

As I light the pink candle today, I reflect upon the rituals and artifacts of beauty that express this Joy and has done so for eons. The Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55) whispers. This song of Joy whispers from Notre Dame in France, from the base of The Mother Tree at FoxHaven, and from St. John the Evangelist in West Grey.

Magnificat anima mea Dominum; 

Et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo, 

Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae; ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes. 

Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est, et sanctum nomen ejus, Et misericordia ejus a progenie in progenies timentibus eum. 

Fecit potentiam brachio suo; 

Dispersit superbos mente cordis sui. 

Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles. 

Esurientes implevit bonis, et divites dimisit inanes. 

Sucepit Israel, puerum suum, recordatus misericordiae suae, Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham et semeni ejus in saecula.