Feast of the Presentation of the Lord
Sunday, February 2, 2025
St Brigid’s Church, Killester
Homily of Archbishop Dermot Farrell
“I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it….”
So begins R.S. Thomas’s faith-filled poem, “The Bright Field.” “I have seen the sun break through …” Today is Candlemas—a feast of light. Traditionally, today is the day, when candles are blessed for use in the Liturgy and in our homes during the year. Forty days after Christmas, we remember anew that “the light that shines in the dark, a light that darkness could not overpower,” (John 1:5) has come into our world, “the light to enlighten the gentiles” (Luke 2:32), as Simeon calls it in today’s Gospel.
In ritual and symbol, the Church puts before us, what we are about, to be witnesses to the One who is the Light of the World, and to be servants of that light. This feast of the Presentation of the Lord is a very fitting day to re-dedicate the altar of this Church of Saint Brigid, its shrine and its relics, a day that celebrates not only Mary and Joseph’s giving thanks to God for the gift of their child, but also the recognition by Simeon and Anna—two prophetic figures—of the significance of what was unfolding around them, before their eyes. Not everyone could glimpse the light that was shining in the Child Jesus on that day, “the sun breaking through to illuminate [that place] for a while,” to borrow a phrase from R.S. Thomas’s poem.
Archbishop Farrell blessing a new mural of St Brigid in St Brigid’s Church, Killester. Photo by John McElroy
The Hidden Presence of our Lord
And here is precisely part of the call of today’s Gospel: to discover for ourselves the light and the hope that Simeon and Anna glimpsed, and took seriously, that day. I would like to spend a few moments listening anew to today’s Gospel, in the hope that we might hear and savour “the hope the Lord’s call holds for us” (see Eph 1:18).
The old man Simeon “prompted by the Spirit” goes to the temple (Luke 2:27). There—by the gift of God—he recognizes God’s promised salvation, in the unlikely guise of a child from Nazareth. This is what the Holy Spirit does: he opens our eyes to what God is doing, not only in great things, in outward appearances, but in littleness, particularly in vulnerability and weakness. This is no simple journey: Simeon is old, and he sensitive to the movement of the Spirit. As individuals and as communities of faith we need to be attentive to the movement of the Spirit, within ourselves, and within our communities. Our hidden and surprising God is revealed in the events of our lives, and usually in significantly unexpected ways.
We have much to learn from Simeon. After all, we read the Scriptures in the Liturgy, in order “to let the pattern of the biblical story to continue to form us.” (John Baldovin SJ) What does Simeon do? He gives thanks to God for what he has seen. And what has he seen? In his own words, he has seen in this child “the light to enlighten the gentiles…” In other words, in Christ, God has shown him the light of the world.
This is what the person of faith is offered. We are offered the light of the world. However, this is not automatic or passive gift. Like Simeon, we are called to receive it, to recognise it, to welcome it. The person of faith is offered an extraordinary gift: we are offered God’s light for the world, God’s hope for us all, for every person. We are called “to look to Jesus, to the unveiled face of God’s image in the light of which we see the image further reflected in ourselves and our neighbours?” (Archbishop Rowan Williams, “Address to the Synod of Bishops,” Rome, October 12, 2012. Archbishop Williams addressed the Thirteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on The New Evangelisation for the Transmission of the Christian Faith at the personal invitation of Pope Benedict XVI.)
The Hidden Treasure
Very often, however, our faith environment and the culture of our Church, have us looking for the action and the call of the Lord—in short, the word of the Lord—in the extraordinary, rather than in the ordinary. We frequently risk seeing our Church, our parish, only in terms of results, goals and success: we look for visibility, for numbers. Simeon is in the temple, but it is not to the temple he points. To the astonished Mary and Joseph, he says, “Do you see this child…?”
If Mary and Joseph are astonished, might we not also be? One of the key gifts of the Spirit is the openness to see Christ and his light in our sisters and brothers. It is in welcoming this gift that we are called to grow. This takes time. It took a lifetime for Simeon and Anna; it will take a lifetime for us. If the mystery of Christ’s life continues in the history of this faith community, then we must be prepared for Christ to enter creatively into our world—and to enter there often with the same inconspicuousness when the Lord stepped into human history in Bethlehem. (See Archbishop Farrell, Homily, Christmas Eve, Pro-Cathedral, Dublin, December 24, 2024).
Discovering HOPE—Opening our Eyes—Seeing what we See
Simeon and Anna find the realisation of their hope in the child Jesus. Their hope was rooted in their confidence in God’s faithfulness: God’s faithfulness to what he had created, to those he had called, to what he had begun.
We might ask ourselves about the source of our own hope. Is it rooted in what we believe God to have done in the past, or is it rooted in what God is doing now? Surely, the whole thrust of the gospel, and of its call, is to root our hope in what our faithful God is doing now. “O that today you would listen to his voice, harden not your hearts,” as we pray in the psalm. (Psalm 94 (95):7–8)
Our hope is to be discovered in the life to which God is calling now, where the Lord is calling Church in this time. The Ireland of the 2020s is not the Ireland of the 1920s, nor is it the Ireland of the 1960s, 70s, or 80s. The same holds for the Church, our Church today. Nobody wants to return to the harshness of the 1920s and to the decades which followed. However, sometimes, when we think of our faith, there’s a type of nostalgia which seems to reign. It is partially due to the selective character of all human memory. But it is also due to the newness, strangeness, and apparent bleakness of the situation in which our Church finds itself. Mary and Joseph were perplexed by what Simeon was saying about Jesus: they “stood there wondering at the things that were being said about” their child. For all their centrality in God’s plan, Simeon’s prayer and his hope were beyond their horizon.
The HOPE in our Church in Dublin Today
There are many signs in our parishes that give me reason to hope. In every parish throughout the Diocese, and I mean this, every parish, in every parish there are people who are utterly committed to their communities and to their parish. They generously give their time to engage with their faith as ministers and members of committees supporting their parish and its mission. This is a key source of vibrancy for every parish.
Last year and this year, we have fifty people who are completing a year-long certificate in catechesis. They will help to prepare our people for the sacraments of Baptism, First Penance, First Holy Communion and Confirmation in the years ahead. The majority of those who now offering pastoral care to our sick in hospitals and to those in prison are laity. This is the Body of Christ alive, with its members using their unique gifts for the good of all. We are re-dedicating this parish church to Saint Brigid—whose core charism was her all-embracing charity. You will remember the story of her spreading her mantle. But for Brigid, and all her contemporaries, women and men—their good words were grounded in, and kept alive by, kept vibrant, by their ongoing, open, dynamic life in Christ—nourished by constant contact with the word of the Lord—a fundamental characteristic of Gaelic Christianity—and with a hunger for Christ’s Body.
Archbishop Farrell during the rededication of St Brigid’s shrine in St Brigid’s Church, Killester. Photo by John Mc Elroy
The Spirit is very much at work in our Church, in us and among us. Without the presence and working of the Spirit, there may be change, but no renewal. What I see here in Dublin is renewal—small, but real—genuine seeds of hope. Hope is founded on reality. There other things that are founded on wishful thinking, on unreality; many call them hope, but enduring Christian, transforming, life-giving hope they are not.
Entering into Hope Anew — “Let him Enter, the King of Glory”
Friends, I call you today to enter anew into this hope. Our first call is to live this day. Our first responsibility as a parish is to embrace our Church as it, with heart open to what the Lord is doing and where God is bringing us. The re-dedication of this altar bears witness to this. It is an act of hope. It puts flesh on our faith. It is our responsibility to embrace our Church as it is; that will mean working with other parishes in new ways, it will mean new partnerships, carrying others and being carried by others. It will mean new levels of ownership of our God-given mission; it will mean being active in ways few lay-people have been active up to this. But this is where the Lord is calling us at this time. To return to Brigid for a moment, her tremendous work was carried out in her place and in her time. Brigid could not imagine this 21st century of ours, what she had to imagine was her own day, and give herself to Christ in that day. Can the same happen in Killester today? “Let him enter, the King of Glory,” (Psalm 23(24):7) we prayed in the Responsorial Psalm. Were someone to ask you what Killester Parish is doing in these years, one could find a worse answer than “letting the King of Glory enter.”
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
(R.S. Thomas, “The Bright Field” [1970])
Simeon and Anna, Witnesses to Hope, pray for us.
Malachi, Prophet of Light, pray for us.
St Brigid, Muire na nGael, Servant of the Poor, pray for us.
+Dermot Farrell
Archbishop of Dublin
