In The Margins: Blessed Bee!

The Paschal Candle is one of the central symbols for Catholics during the Season of Easter. It is lit from the Easter Fire at the beginning of the Easter Vigil and is relit in our midst as our community celebrates the sacraments of marriage and baptism for the entire year. If you have a moment before or after Mass, come and take a closer look at it: you will find 4 “thorns” piercing the soft beeswax, a symbol of Christ’s wounds on the cross; the Greek letters Alpha and Omega, a biblical title for Jesus as beginning and end, are embossed into the design. One rubric which guides the materials we use at worship requires that the candles used in the celebration of the Eucharist be composed of at least fifty one-percent beeswax, but if you inhale the scent of our Paschal Candle you cannot mistake that it is made entirely of beeswax from honeybees raised by the Marklin Candle Company, who lovingly keep bees, and design and craft Paschal Candles to burn in the sanctuaries of parishes across the whole Church.
 
As the human family grapples with the looming impacts of climate change, the Paschal Candle takes on another layer of symbolism as this most important pollinator, the honeybee, is currently perishing at alarming rates. It is estimated that we have roughly 2.4 million managed hives in the US today, compared to roughly 6 million hives in the 1940s. Hive failure, or “collapse” and the decline of wild honeybee populations are understood to be related to climate change and a reduction of bees’ natural habitat. Continued overdevelopment of natural land reduced the areas in which bees have to forage for food.
 
As we gaze on this bright light that calls us to a renewed contemplation of our own sacraments, let us follow the call put upon us in the papal encyclical Laudato Si’ to cultivate
 
...“a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature. Each community can take from the bounty of the earth whatever it needs for subsistence, but it also has the duty to protect the earth and to ensure its fruitfulness for coming generations.” -Pope Francis, Laudato Si, Ch. 2.
 
Praise ‘Bee’!