Last Thursday, the Church marked the feast of Candlemas, or the Feast of the Presentation, when Jesus was presented to God in the temple forty days after his birth. As we hear and read in the Song of Simeon, Jesus was recognized as a “Light to enlighten the nations, and the glory of [God’s] people, Israel (Luke 2:29-32, BCP 135).” The focus on light developed over Christian history, leading to candle lit processions on the Feast of the Presentation, and eventually the custom of blessing a parish’s candles. It’s from these traditions that we get the name Candlemas.
It’s also the beginning of Black History Month, a time when we are invited as a country to celebrate the life, contributions, history, and legacy of Black Americans. As I was reflecting how the beginning of this month coincides with Candlemas, one image in particular stood out: Harriet Tubman, the Moses of her people, carrying a lantern through the dark woods on her flight from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where she was enslaved, to Philadelphia, and later Canada – lands of freedom.
Or at least, I thought that was the image I remembered. When I went back to look for it in the book I had been reading, Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom, written by Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by Kadir Nelson, I couldn’t find it. Maybe it was later in the book, when Tubman returned to lead groups of enslaved people out of the South. But no. It wasn’t there either. I’d imagined it.
Instead, what I found were pictures of Tubman in the dark, lit only by the moon. Traveling under the cover of darkness was one of the ways Tubman and the people she freed were able to move. There was no lantern in these illustrations –the darkness helped keep them safe. Why had I imagined that there was a lantern, that light was required?
Christian symbolism and imagery often plays with images of light and dark. This is rooted in Biblical imagery for Jesus (the Song of Simeon in Luke 2:32 and throughout the Gospel of John, among others places). We chant “The Light of Christ! Thanks be to God!” as we process the Paschal Candle during the Easter Vigil. On Sunday the baptized babies and their families were given candles lit from the Paschal Candle representing that same light.
Over time, however, images of light and dark in the West have become synonymous with good and bad. Think of descriptions of Gandalf and Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, or the outfits of many Disney villains (Maleficent, Jaffar, Ursula, the Evil Queen in Snow White – they all wear a lot of dark colors). This had made it all too easy for systems of oppression, like racism in the United States, to use the color of one’s skin as the basis for subjugation and judgement. But darkness isn’t bad. Indeed, as pastor and theologian Rev. Dr. Kelle Brown writes, creation began in the dark and God blessed the day and the night. She reflects on Howard Thurman’s book The Luminous Darkness in which he reframes the definition of darkness, finding beauty in himself and in the dark, reminding us that “God is also God in the dark” (Brown).
God was certainly still God in the dark for Tubman. Accounts of her life attest to the dreams and visions by which God guided her safely along the paths of the Underground Railroad. In addition to her own survival skills that she had learned from her father, like making remedies from plants and roots, predicting the weather, which nuts and berries were safe to eat, and how to navigate by the stars, her deep faith by day and night kept her and the people she led alive (Weatherford). She carried Christ without any physical light – as Cristina preached in her sermon on Sunday, it glowed within her, her own luminous dark.
Reflecting on Tubman and Candlemas, I wonder how we can hold on to the light of Christ – a potent and powerful image that has certainly helped me through difficult times – without limiting our perception of light and dark to one thing only. After all, no one symbol or image can capture or contain the full presence and meaning of Christ (Kelly Brown Douglas, A Womanist Approach, 108). Just like seeds planted in the ground, we need the dark of the soil to grow and nurture our roots the same as we need the sun above to help us grow our leaves. We need them both. It is easy to fall into either/or patterns of thinking, but again and again I am reminded that such dualism is limiting, and often harmful. Instead of finding a lantern, I found something infinitely more powerful: the witness of one of the Saints of God, making her way through the perils of day and night, led by her gifts and her faith in God.
Love,
Rebecca+