While all stand and hold their burning candles,
themselves lamps, in which Christ's light glows—the deacon, in the white
vestments of joy, goes up on to the ambo, and calls heaven and earth, and the
whole people of God to the festal celebration. He begins the Praeconium Paschale, the jubilant hymn of praise for
this blessed night, for the light which it has borne; for Christ, the true
Paschal lamb who has blotted out our account of guilt with his blood shed in
love, blessed and touched the door-posts and made the way out of the Egypt of
sin into the promised land of resurrection open for us; for the fiery pillars
of God's light which shine out for the freed men and those on their way home;
for its earthly sign, the Paschal candle; last of all, for the bee, who as an
honey-gatherer and wax maker, is the virgin mother of this symb0l like the
virgin, Mary, who bore the true light for the world's sake, and like the Church
who makes this light burn before us each year in the sacred liturgy.
One must see and hear this, as it is now again
possible to do, at night: the church dark, in a press of people. First only the
flame of the Paschal candle, just bright enough to reflect the white silk of
the deacon's vestments (what a marvelous joy this sight alone is, after the
dull purple and black of the last days). Then at the third call of lumen Christi the blazing up of the
hundreds of candles in the hands of the people. It is a picture such as
Prudentius paints of Christian antiquity in his hymn for the lighting of the
lamps, a picture of the great basilica filled with a great throng, all with
lights in their hands; the many precious lamps which hang down on slender
hangers from the beautifully painted framework of the roof, or burn in their
candelabra, a vast sea of light which reflects the gold and many colors of the
mosaics, a sea in which the pillars of marble and porphyry seem to float; above
all the young voice of the deacon, trembling with joy, and the incomparable,
lovely melody which goes up to heaven, sails out over the earth, and sets every
heart free with the joy of the Easter news: 'This is the night. . O truly
blessed night.'
To have once heard and seen this, with the true
childlikeness of heart which has kept the capacity to think in images and
symbols, this is to know the real Christian Pasch. It is and it remains the mysterium of night: 'this night' is
everywhere present where there are men, where the sins of men, and the death
that is the train of sin, have brought darkness upon the once bright day of
God's good creation. 'This night,' which could bring nothing out of its poor
and barren womb except sobs, tears and cries for help, has received the merciful
light of God. The light has come down to the dark; although at first it seemed
buried in the darkness of night, it overcame this dark, made of the tomb a
womb, and leapt out of it once more in a birth of God's life. We men of every
age who have come to believe, are this blessed darkness, which may give birth
from a barren womb. The light is Christ who gets the victory over our sin as we
are baptized, and shines as the morning star within us. This morning star 'which has no setting rejoices
over this night like a mother with her new-born child. The night is changed by
this birth, in its very essence 'light as the day' and 'truly blessed'. For,
where it was a night of unblessed human sin and divine wrath, it has become the
night of the Lord's blessed passion and of God's mercy. The place where divine
light was buried has given birth to resurrection and a day that shall never
end.
Hence the Easter hymn of
praise at the beginning of the Paschal night and especially the repeated haec nox have this moving tone which
cannot fail to grip the Christian. It is not a song about events which are over
and done with, which have nothing to do with us, but of what is happening now,
and what is happening always, when in the course of the year the Pasch returns.
It is a song of the change of our night of sin into the daylight of living in
Christ. All we need is humility of heart, awareness of the darkness of our sin,
without any deeper intellectual grasp, if we will understand what the light and
the hymn of Easter would say. If we are humble and full of faith we shall
recognize in this sensible union of symbol and speech, even here at the
beginning of the great Paschal night, the presence of the entire Paschal
mystery. We shall draw from the unconquerable certainty of Easter, which alone
makes our life on earth bearable, the courage to say Christ is risen! He is
truly risen.' And the light shines in darkness.
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