Gaudete Sunday is one of those little gifts hidden in the Christian tradition. I'd never even head of it in my long years of being an agnostic and cultural Christian. Although I love "hype", in the sense that the Nativity scene (to take one example) has been "hyped" over centuries, it's also nice to discover some element of the Christian tradition that is almost entirely without "hype" and yet is very ancient.
The sight of the pink candle on the Advent wreath is also beautiful, and strangely surprising. You'd expect another purple candle, but it's pink instead.
It reminds me of one of the most profound passags in Chesterton's Orthodoxy, which more than any other book made me a Christian:
It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is the uncanny element in everything. It seems a sort of secret treason in the universe. An apple or an orange is round enough to get itself called round, and yet is not round after all. The earth itself is shaped like an orange in order to lure some simple astronomer into calling it a globe. A blade of grass is called after the blade of a sword, because it comes to a point; but it doesn't. Everywhere in things there is this element of the quiet and incalculable. It escapes the rationalists, but it never escapes till the last moment.Now, this is exactly the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity. Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth. It not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong (if one may say so) exactly where the things go wrong. Its plan suits the secret irregularities, and expects the unexpected. It is simple about the simple truth; but it is stubborn about the subtle truth. It will admit that a man has two hands, it will not admit (though all the Modernists wail to it) the obvious deduction that he has two hearts. It is my only purpose in this chapter to point this out; to show that whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.
I always remember a Catholic teacher having no idea why the third candle is rose and making some implausible excuse for something that had centuries of tradition behind it . The fact that Lutherans had wreaths in their churches before most Catholics did shows how preTridentine the usage of the colour is.
ReplyDeleteThat's fascinating! Also this snippet from Wikipedia: "In 1964, an Advent crown, made at home from wire coathangers and tinsel, appeared on the BBC's bi-weekly children's TV program Blue Peter. This "make" became one of the program's most iconic features, repeated each year, and was the introduction of this tradition to most of the broadly Anglican audience. In later years, the candles were replaced by baubles, out of concern for fire safety."
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