Story of a Story

NOW AND again, I come across an item in the newspaper, or on television, that makes me ask myself, “What would St. Anthony have made of this?” One I saw a few weeks ago told how a manuscript that had lain forgotten in a box for two centuries had been identified as the first fairytale written by Hans Christian Andersen. It was written between 1822 and 1826, while Andersen was still at school. The story is called The Tallow Candle, and tells how a dirty, misunderstood candle finds happiness when it is lit by a tinder box (a small container containing flint, firesteel, and tinder used together to help kindle a fire – tinderboxes have now been replaced by matches).

The young Andersen gave the story to a childhood friend, but somehow it ended up in the public Archives of Odense, until it was discovered by a local historian.

Both the story itself and the ‘story of the story’ have lessons for us, which I feel sure St. Anthony would have been able to point out. Both the neglected candle and the neglected story could be taken as images of the human soul, or of a human life.

 

Fourfold fire

 

The fire that lights the candle, or the person who discovers the story and publishes it, can be taken to represent the Holy Spirit, or Christ Himself.

The Saint writes that fire has four characteristics – it burns, it cleanses, it warms and it gives light. In the same way, the Holy Spirit burns away our sins, cleanses our hearts, warms us from our spiritual lethargy and enlightens our minds. He notes that fire itself (a modern scientist would speak of radiation) is invisible, but it becomes visible and of various colours in the material it burns. In the same way, the Holy Spirit becomes visible in the persons through whom He operates (see the Sermon for Pentecost, Sermons I, 407).

This year, Easter comes early, at the very end of this month. Although we liturgically commemorate the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, we should not forget that, in St. John’s Gospel, it was on Easter evening that the Risen Lord breathed on His disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The lighted candle, formerly neglected and rejected, can also be taken as a symbol of the Risen Christ, now radiating the Spirit of God and enkindling the spirits of his followers.

 

Threefold candle

 

In another sermon, Anthony points out that a lighted candle consists of three elements – the fire itself, the wax and the wick. Applying the image to Christ Himself, he says that the fire is the divinity, the wax the humanity, the wick (made of ‘tow’, a coarse fibre from hemp or flax) represents the harshness of the Passion (Sermons III,426). In our own lives, the Holy Spirit kindles the fire of love and contrition for our sins, softening our heart, yet requiring the harshness of self-discipline and penance to achieve its effect in us. Extending the metaphor, we might say that the warmth of the Spirit enables the hard wax of our nature to be re-formed into a more perfect likeness of Christ.

In Hans Andersen’s story, the neglected candle received fire from a tinder-box. In his day, such a box would be carried about, containing some easily combustible substance, ‘tinder’ (possibly a piece of dried or charred linen), together with flint and steel. The flint and steel would be used to make a spark, to be caught by the tinder and then fanned to a flame by blowing on it. I can imagine St. Anthony using this example, so that the ‘tinder’ represents our human nature. Flint and steel represent the sufferings and setbacks of our lives, whereby God strikes a spark of repentance into us, which He then blows into a flame by the breath of His Spirit. Anthony used all sorts of examples, often using the same one to illustrate quite different points. It is good practice for us, then, to look out for images and illustrations for spiritual truths, in the examples furnished by our daily lives.

 

Reawakening the flame

 

The ‘story of the story’ that I mentioned above may represent the way in which the Gospel story itself can lie, neglected and forgotten, in individual hearts and in our society. How many adults there are, who in childhood learned the Christian story from their parents and at school – especially at Christmas and at Easter – but who in later life seem to have forgotten it, or who at any rate do not see it as relevant to their lives. In Europe – and I dare say in other ‘western’ countries – the faith that historically moulded our society is now marginalised. We are beginning to see how the very fabric of civilisation is suffering as a result.

As we draw near to the end of Lent and the dawn of Eastertide, can we all take more seriously our responsibility as Christians to proclaim the Gospel, the story of death and resurrection which centres on God Himself taking on human nature, in order to share our griefs and frustrations, and open a way out of them?

 

Don Quixote

 

As Christians, we are custodians of ‘the greatest story ever told,’ and we cannot allow it to lie forgotten in a box. In his own day, St. Anthony travelled thousands of miles, retelling that story to the men and women of his day who had forgotten it, or who did not feel its relevance to their daily lives. St. Francis compared himself to the wandering minstrels who sang the stories of chivalry to any who would listen: but his story was of the love of God, in Christ, for the world He had made and for those who were all children of the heavenly Father. I sometimes think of Francis as a ‘Don Quixote’ figure, after Cervantes’ sixteenth-century knight who thought he could revive the chivalric ideals of a past age. How mad was that! Francis, too, was laughed at to begin with, and regarded as mad.

If we in our day try to rediscover and retell the Eternal Story, to exemplify in our own lives the teaching of Jesus Christ, there is every prospect that we also shall be regarded as mad, as living in the past, as irrelevant. We must not be daunted! Human souls lie, lost, in the darkness, like Andersen’s tallow candle. We can be the tinder-box that sets them on fire again, to find true happiness.