The Paschal Candle has been fetched from Cambridge. Thank you to Fr Bienn Carlo Manuntag for painting it so beautifully. Can you spot the bees? The deacon will sing about them at the Easter Vigil in the Exsultet:
"On this, your night of grace, O holy Father, accept this candle, a solemn offering, the work of bees and of your servants’ hands, an evening sacrifice of praise, this gift from your most holy Church.But now we know the praises of this pillar,which glowing fire ignites for God’s honour, a fire into many flames divided, yet never dimmed by sharing of its light,f or it is fed by melting wax, drawn out by mother bees to build a torch so precious."
Pope Pius XII said this to beekeepers in 1948:
"Ah, if men could and would listen to the lesson of the bees: if each one knew how to do his daily duty with order and love at the post assigned to him by Providence; if everyone knew how to enjoy, love, and use in the intimate harmony of the domestic hearth the little treasures accumulated away from home during his working day: if men, with delicacy, and to speak humanly, with elegance, and also, to speak as a Christian, with charity in their dealings with their fellow men, would only profit from the truth and the beauty conceived in their minds, from the nobility and goodness carried about in the intimate depths of their hearts, without offending by indiscretion and stupidity, without soiling the purity of their thought and their love, if they only knew how to assimilate without jealousy and pride the riches acquired by contact with their brothers and to develop them in their turn by reflection and the work of their own minds and hearts; if, in a word, they learned to do by intelligence and wisdom what bees do by instinct—how much better the world would be! Working like bees with order and peace, men would learn to enjoy and have others enjoy the fruit of their labours, the honey and the was, the sweetness and the light in this life here below."
