Candle store: Advent Doors 2018
DOOR 21
From huge altar candles to individual votive lights, this is the place we turn to when the darkness is creeping in. The candle store is stocked with candles of all different sizes to tide us through Christmas and services throughout the year.
Candles are a beautiful and important part of our Advent and Christmas celebrations: we sing carols by candlelight, welcome schoolchildren to light Christingles, and each Sunday at our 11am Choral Eucharist we have been lighting a new candle in our Advent wreath.
At Christmas we celebrate the light that shines in the darkness: Jesus Christ, the light of the world, who is the difference between darkness and a world blazing with light. Such a small flickering flame: a baby born in a stable. A tiny infant who would grow up to save the whole world.
Today is the shortest day of the year: 21 December, the day of greatest darkness. Daylight is brief and fleeting, and darkness seems to descend far too soon.
The globe will tilt back towards the sun. It always does. And the sunshine will melt away the memories of frosty winter. But right now we are poised at the tipping point of winter: the moment where gathering darkness gives way to dawning light.
Appropriate, then, that we should be mere days away from the moment when we mark the light of Christ dawning in the world. At Christmas we celebrate not just the birth of a special baby, but the beginning of the new creation: heaven and earth united in a child.
We stand at the tipping point of the seasons and the tipping point of salvation, both.
The snow is melting. Aslan is on the move.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1.5)
