An icon depicting Martyn Kelly's grandson with his Chinese great-grandmother. Photo: Martyn Kelly.
Two of a kind: Martyn Kelly’s Candlemas reflection
‘I have a lot of empathy with Simeon and Anna.’
Candlemas, celebrated in early February, commemorates the presentation of Jesus at the Temple (Luke 2: 21-40), and features two intriguing characters: Simeon and Anna. Simeon, Luke tells us, was ‘waiting for the consolation of Israel’, while Anna ‘never left the temple but worshipped night and day’. Both saw, in the infant Jesus, the promise of hope.
The backdrop was the Roman occupation. But rather than reacting with violence, Simeon and Anna represented a strand of Judaism that, drawing on Psalm 35, has been referred to as ‘The Quiet in the Land’. It is a phrase used by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship, and by some Mennonites to encapsulate their tradition of living within society while not approving of all its institutions.
Whether this is what the author of Psalm 35 had in mind is not clear, but it resonates with how Quakers want to live today. It also raises questions about just how ‘active’ a contemplative needs to be. In Quaker terminology, Anna’s approach equates to ‘holding in the light’ the dire political situation within her country. Can we understand, let alone explain, how the processes that we know collectively as ‘prayer’ function? I cannot, yet, at the same time, I have a lot of empathy with Simeon and Anna.
Their counterweights were the militant Judaeans, who represented the feeling that ‘something must be done’ when confronted by injustice and evil. The rationalist in me says that prayer can never be uncoupled completely from action. Each of us is the most effective agent for fulfilling prayer. What is it to hold someone (or something) in the light if not to see their condition more clearly? And why would we want to see their condition more clearly if not to help them? Or to try to change the systems within which they are embedded?
Yet I don’t think that Simeon and Anna can be equated with modern Quaker activists. They display an order of patience that must have appeared to border on inaction, or even acquiescence. They waited, prayed, and waited some more. One imagines that their prayers were reflected in their lives too – that they were the epicentre of their own quiet revolutions. If they were ‘patterns and examples’, it was because that was how they wanted to live, rather than how they wanted to be perceived.
I was thinking about this when I was sent a picture of my grandson with his Chinese great-grandmother, Lin Shiying. In her eighties now, she has lived through civil war, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the transition to market socialism. Her eyes had seen so much, and now, in much the same way as Anna greeting the infant Jesus, she had her reward. Her rapt gaze seemed to encapsulate ‘Righteous Anna, the Prophetess’, as celebrated in Orthodox traditions, so I used the picture to create an icon (left). It will sit in my study not as an object of devotion but as a reminder of the virtues of patience in the face of adversity, and when the status quo seems intent on a course that is far from Quaker ideals.
