I came to understand a few months ago the beauty and love expressed for our Lord by the use of 100% beeswax candles at Mass while staying at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Morganza, Maryland. Great love is in little details. The depth of beauty in these candles stems from their capacity to unite two elements of the Catholic faith: the beauty of God’s creation and the liturgy.
Almost everybody takes for granted the candles used in Catholic liturgies. In our age, we could substitute candles for LED lights; even the old Church could simply rely on sunshine for liturgies. So why candles? The first reason is the candle’s reminder of the birth of our Church amidst the catacombs of Rome and blood of the holy martyrs that fertilized the soil of St. Peter’s rock. Those days required Mass and vigils by torchlight in the tombs of saints. Second, we use wax — particularly beeswax — to signify how we wish our hearts to lose their hardness as they are melted by the flame of love for Christ.
Bees themselves have traditionally been used as an analogy of the Church, including by St. John Chrysostom, the Doctor of Preachers. The Church transforms beeswax, laboriously obtained from virginal bees (as we have received Christ from the Queen of Virgins), into beautiful white candles, a symbol of the glory of the Paschal Mystery. The Church gives us six candles by the altar as an allusion to the Book of Revelation and the seven lights of the Altar of Gold with Christ, the True Light, at the center. How beautiful a gift are the candles of the Church, lighting the altar with fiery joy as our hearts burn at the Mass!
Bees, of course, are important to the ecosystem as well as the liturgy. Scientists worry about the decline of bees, even to the point of extinction. While that’s an unlikely worst-case scenario, their importance to the world highlights our role as stewards of the gifts of the environment.
God only needed a world big enough for Calvary, but He has given us so much more—in creation and the liturgy.
Mr. Trossbach is a College II seminarian for the Archdiocese of Washington.