Light Your Paschal Candle This Sunday

All Saints' Day is this Sunday. Be sure to light your Paschal Candle.

It's a surprisingly controversial statement, to be sure. The official guidance from the US Conference of Catholic Biships is that the Paschal Candle is extinguished at Pentecost, and then removed (completely) from the Sanctuary unless for Holy Baptism or for a funeral.

In his seminal Manual on the Liturgy for the Lutheran Book of Worship, Philip Pfatteicher holds to the same position: that the Paschal Candle should not be used outside of the Great Fifty Days (with the exceptions of Baptisms and funerals), and it should never be used as the Christ Candle in the Advent wreath.

Guidelines from the Episcopal Church and the ELCA speak volumes by their silence: no other time outside of Easter, Holy Baptism, and funerals are addressed.

There is a certain logic to this: Easter is the marker of the Resurrection, and so the use of the Paschal Candle at funerals makes sense. And Baptism was, at one point, possibly, maybe kind of restricted to the Vigil. Using the Paschal Candle at "off-season" Baptisms makes sense as a way of emphasizing the continuity between the Sacrament as it is celebrated at the Great Vigil and throughout the rest of the year.

But it is exactly this connection to Resurrection that makes the Paschal Candle such an important symbol for use on All Saints' and All Souls' Days services. In her Altar Guild and Sacristy Handbook, S. Anita Stauffer points out that "the Paschal Candle is a resurrection symbol" (p. 19; ironically, she does this while discouraging its use during Evening Prayer).

The light marks our hope in the Resurrection of Christ. We cling to this hope on the first two days in November. We pray for the Faithful Departed specifically because we hope that Easter will lead to the Resurrection of the Body. We hope that the light which pierces the darkness of Holy Saturday will pierce the darkness of our sorrow. We hope that the promises made in Baptism will hold true through the grave. The light that pierced the darkness at the funeral is also the light in which we hope on All Saints' and All Souls'.

All Saints' and All Souls' are the Easter season erupting into the Ordinary Time of early November.

And maybe, just maybe, our liturgy is dynamic enough to accommodate our faith.