Lights and voices.
That is what we bring to Candlemas: lights and voices. We offer to God the sound of our human voices which is the true and laudable sacrificial act of giving God ourselves in a very real sense —an act to which all of the bloody sacrifices of the Tabernacle pointed. The human body is, as Peter Leithart and Jim Jordan have argued, the original instrument.
We also bring lights and so return to God the gifts of the first day of creation: light and darkness, day and night.
In our music bringing and lamp blessing we also achieve something else: the liturgical husbandry of technology. Lights and instruments, among the other things they do, are symbolic of the technologies of humankind. They are representatives of all of our prosthesis —our modes of extending ourselves through tools, instruments, and other apparatuses.
By bringing our lights into the church on Candlemas we halt the Promethean myth: our technology is not something we develop without limit so as to achieve a collective godhood. The liturgy sets the limits and boundaries of our technological development. Liturgy also establishes the biblical purpose for technology. Our songs, our instruments, our lights, and our technology, are find their meaning by being brought in the liturgy to God, who speaks to us from his Word.
Apart from this our technology threatens to break us. Already transhumanists like Kevin Warwick refer to the processes of the body as “archaic” and “out-dated”, things that can be easily disposed of once we achieve the technology to extend ourselves without limit or, frankly, without purpose except that process of sheer extension.
Against the aggressions of the transhumanists, Luddites offer various alternatives for limiting and curbing our technological excess. Often, however, the Luddite only offers historical moments for us to regress to and, once there, forever pause and reenact. The original Luddites wanted to do away with large mechanical looms, but not individual looms, needles, or clothes themselves. And so the Luddite’s arguments seem capricious in their selection of what to curtail and why.
What the Biblical story, as performed in the liturgy of the church, is a far superior alternative to both Luddism and transhumanism (in all its permutations). We bring our lamps to the Lord. Lightbulbs, lights, candles, lamps, etc., all recall the originary technology of fire. We come to him to give us both a vision for its proper use and to set its boundaries and limitations: “Here O Lord, bless these lights; that their use may glorify Thee, welcome the lost, and brighten this present darkness; until the brightness of Thy appearing brings the city whose light is the Lamb and which needs neither sun nor moon; and the day breaks, and the shadows flee away from the mount of Myrrh and the haunts of lions. Amen”
This Wednesday, bring your illuminative tech to the worship of the church, and there, in the light of Christ, find its proper place in your house and life.