Votive Candles
RockyRoger
Shipmate
Lighting candles in church as a thanksgiving, an aid to prayer or the simple joy of following a long tradition has always been part of my (not particularly high) C of E practice. In recovery from Covid-19, Mrs RR went to light a candle this morning for a couple of loved ones. Alas, all places where we could do this - Lady Chapel, next to the high altar etc - had been removed.
WTF? She asked beloved-father-in-charge why? H&S, apparently. Unsupervised naked lights are no longer permitted. Church Commisioners ... Insurance .... blah, blah blah ....
Really? Two thousand years of Christian tradition banned, 'just like that'?
I'm really quite distressed .... any comments? Have other shipmates come across this nonsense?
WTF? She asked beloved-father-in-charge why? H&S, apparently. Unsupervised naked lights are no longer permitted. Church Commisioners ... Insurance .... blah, blah blah ....
Really? Two thousand years of Christian tradition banned, 'just like that'?
I'm really quite distressed .... any comments? Have other shipmates come across this nonsense?
Comments
I'm imagining someone's hand going up, and them freaking out and yelling, "I knew I was a Vampire aaargh"
As for the insurance thing, I call saving money on tea candles.
(A thought occurs - the commonly-used tea lights are very unlikely to fall over, but the same can't be said for the tall, thin candles one sometimes sees. What sort of candle has been in use at Your Place?).
Is it feasible to ask to look at the insurance documentation?
Tea lights, well away from anything flammable, safely on a sturdy metal stand, and on a stone floor, should be OK. There are other options, as @Arethosemyfeet has suggested.
Our Place is not often left entirely unattended - the church is open for Mass every day, and is kept open for however long after the service that FatherInCharge is around. He may well be busy in the Vestry or Sacristy, of course, rather than in the church proper.
Yes, so have we.
Otherwise LED tea lights are cheap and last quite a long time.
I've seen some with a bed of sand into which the candles are placed.
As for Episcopal/Anglican churches, I could probably count on one hand those in these parts where I’ve seen votive candles, and I’d still have a finger or two left over—and I’ve been in lots of Episcopal churches. It just doesn’t seem to be that much of a thing. I even know of some RC churches that don’t have them.
I think some of the uptick in the UK is linked to immigration, particularly from Poland. I know my dad's parish in Lincolnshire get a lot of Polish visitors who want to light a candle and I wouldn't be at all surprised if other parish churches have picked up on that need.
Are you in North Carolina? Are Episcopal in the US South a bit lower down the candle than in the Northeast and Midwest? I’ve certainly seen votive candles at some, not all, Episcopal parishes in the Northeast.
What shocks me is that there are some RC parishes I have been to that don’t have any candles for visitors to light. Maybe it’s for a similar reason? If the reason is because the church has carpeting, then that’s a good reason to not put carpeting in a church
I’ve also noticed some RC churches where all they have are multi-day giant candles, and that you have to pay a fair amount to light one (3-5 US dollars or more). I’m used to 1-2 dollars, and this is before the current inflation. (Candle offerings in RC churches are usually not presented as optional, but no one is watching to prevent the very poor from lighting candles without paying, and I’m sure God wouldn’t mind if a poor person didn’t make a monetary offering).
Besides, the congregation I'm thinking of didn't have their own building but hired a school hall.
I'm told that Baptist churches in Denmark and other parts of Europe occupied by the Nazis took to using candles as the troopers tended to leave them alone if they saw lighted candles.
On the Orthodox sand-trays ... for reasons I've never understood you often get someone going round extinguishing the candles part way through a service. I know priests who don't approve of this practice but it seems common and to have stuck.
There is no good reason for carpeting a church. But despite that, most churches around here have at least some carpet.
GIA Publications used to give out buttons that said “Carpet bedrooms, not churches.”
I’m referring to churches where all the floor is carpet.
Ours is metal with ledges of sand, the tea lights placed on the sand.
There are, I think, at least three possible reasons for this practice:
(1) It is easier to remove the ends if there is enough left unburnt to get a grip on.
(2) If they are allowed to burn all the way down the last bit tends to spread a pool of wax into the sand, so that when the candle wax is removed some sand is also removed with it, and so the sand needs to be topped up more frequently.
(3) It makes room for more candles to be lit by those arriving later.
Doublethink, Admin
We are not a statues and candles kind of a place, so it is hardly ever used. I don't think I have ever lit a candle in church in my entire life.
Cynically, one feels that they are largely welcomed because they make a great deal of money (far more than the cost of the candles). But why not? At least nowhere round here seems to have adopted the common (but not universal) Italian practice of electric candles.
I wonder if the increase in popularity of votive candles is due to the need to express emotion that became apparent after Princess Diana's death, followed by many other tragedies that gave rise to mass emotion, especially here in Merseyside the Hillsborough disaster. When people are reticent to talk about their faith, or lack of it, this is a way to express their feelings.
The 'candles' one sees in Italian churches have usually orange flickering lights and are just like the ones I saw in the Catholic church in Moscow over 40 years ago.
Balance is maintained.
🤣
True.
I've seen electric votive candles in some French churches, too, though I can't recall how much they cost. One Euro seems a bit steep...it must have been less...
Also in France I've seen a choice from small to medium to large. There is a sliding scale of charges to suit the size.
'Tuppence, thrupence or a bob,' as the salacious pre decimal rhyme had it back in my sniggering school days.
The large French ones cost about 7 Euros or so if I remember rightly and were meant to burn all day long presumably making your prayers more efficacious.
Or is that a piece of residual Protestant cynicism?
Is there any overlap between these overzealous extinguishers and the people who look after church finances?
Some suppliers will offer a discount to churches that return candle stubs as the wax can be melted and reused to make new candles.
Here in the US, where people more depictions of modern majority-white evangelical and Black Protestant churches in TV and movies, people don’t necessarily associate votive candles with “default” Christianity, but among very secular young people here, who probably don’t watch much TV or movies in the first place, it is not uncommon for them to assume that all Christian ministers dress like Catholic priests, celebrate the Eucharist in a Catholic way, and light candles with images of the Sacred Heart or of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the side of them.
I have no idea why we have it - I suspect it was one of those donations which can't be refused, rather like the hand-stitched tapestry of Squinting Jesus, which disappeared, thankfully, the last time the Session room was repainted.
It is used - yesterday, two of the tea lights were burning during the service, and I've seen as many as 5 lit. I've lit a tea-light myself, for someone I thought would appreciate being told that I had done so.
We've been thinking hard about your post, but can't come up with a reason why you would choose 5 rows of 17 rather than of 20. 17 is a prime number, but so is 19. Any clues welcome.
I have no idea. I don't even know why we have it - I assume it was a donation. It's definitely not something the Kirk Session decided we needed and commissioned.
85 tea-lights is overkill for our church. People do use it, but I'd say on the average Sunday there are between 2 and 4 lit.
A couple of years ago we were given a donation of a modern representation of the Pictish beast. This delighted me, as it's my Ship avatar, but it wasn't clear why the donor thought the church needed it. I think people want to give something tangible and then cast around to see if they can think of something. And somebody thought "I know! I'll donate a wrought iron tea-light stand with a 17 x 5 array."