February 2nd, the feast of Candlemas, celebrates Christ’s presentation at the temple, reminding his followers that his arrival promises light in a dusky world. On such occasions, those of us in low-church traditions often lose an opportunity for praise—for recognition of the history and honor that comes with commemorations of Scriptural rhythm.
T.S. Eliot’s little-known poem “Song for Simeon” beckons awe-filled commemoration even from those who would not otherwise ponder today, Simeon, Mary, and the Christ-child in the temple. Eliot inhabits the voice of Simeon, whom Luke terms a “righteous and devout” Jerusalem man, “waiting for the consolation of Israel.” Simeon, in Eliot’s imagining, repeats an appeal to the Lord to “Grant us thy peace,” closing with the Scriptural request: “Let thy servant depart / Having seen thy salvation.”
Simeon and Eliot’s picture of him encourage a posture of patience and a recognition of transience rare today, especially in the face of today’s skittish foci on self and safety. Early in Eliot’s poem, Simeon sings,
My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand Dust in sunlight and memory in corners, Wait for the wind that chills toward the dead land
With a life lightweight as a feather, Simeon waits for death. Having “walked many years in this city, / Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,” Simeon asks not for praise but merely for peace. He knows that, as one with “eighty years and no tomorrow,” only the Christ-child, the “the still unspeaking and unspoken Word” can give rest. He rejoices in this knowledge of his own smallness and Christ’s promise.
Simeon’s waiting contrasts today’s COVID-exacerbated striving. While Simeon waits for death, we fumble in fear of it, as the past two years’ progression of “public health” mandates show. While Simeon asks for divinely-given consolation, we struggle after manufactured solutions.
Fear of death, which Simeon shows no signs of, drives man to make mechanisms: to build towers “lest we be dispersed.” Though our manufactured solutions shield neither from particular dispersions and diseases nor the universal “death wind,” we clasp them. We cry that more forced masks, shots, and isolation will “stop the surge” and “slow the spread.”
More mechanisms of man must, we insist, be imposed, else we face now that fact which will tackle us one day, whether in a car or on a hospital bed: the fact of death. More mechanisms must be imposed, else we remember that “dust you are, and to dust you will return.”
The “vaccine passport,” once termed a phantasm of conspiracy theorists, now occupies a literal place in the anti-COVID regime, as Paul Kingsnorth locates. Whether for entrance into foreign countries or corner cafes, vaccine passports mimic a social credit system and threaten to warp dust-made man into a micromanaged cog in what Kingsnorth calls the “smooth, clean, ordered world” of the Machine.
Most major cities in the U.S. now treat vaccination as a ticket for basic societal participation. In New York, for example, even a five year old must present his vaccination papers to play at a community center, despite evidence that COVID poses minute risk to children and that vaccination cannot prevent transmission of the virus (though it helps against infection). Boosters, too, function as a prerequisite for enjoying the arts and higher education, despite the fact that repeated vaccination fails to fully combat the virus.
Fear forces such measures. Fear will stretch them past purportedly temporary status, as it has since March 2020.
In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff identify this attitude as “Safetyism:” “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.”
Safety, as R.R. Reno recognizes at First Things, holds significance. Yet fear for material safety may grow “disordered,” according to Reno, when enshrined above concern for the communal and “very real spiritual danger of fear itself.” Against the scramble for safety as an intrinsic good stands Simeon’s plea for peace as a divine gift.
“My life is light,” Simeon tells us. Man is a lightweight being, but man’s being is also bestowed by Light. Though but dust, man may be “dust in sunlight.”
The Son’s light illumines his patient servant.
Though those on the Right readily recognize COVID’s testimony to safetyism, fear of death figures beyond COVID. We fear death to self in this tense age, too. If we deny our place and peace under the Son’s light, we deny our dust-nature. If we seek a safety in personal comfort during this “time of sorrow,” we forget, contra Simeon’s example, that the mechanistic endeavors of this world ought to be expected. After all, “According to thy word / They shall praise thee and suffer in every generation.”
