Tears on My Candle
Evangelizing Fandom
We live in a fallen world, full of heartbreak and sorrow. Occasionally, the clouds part and a beam of sunlight sneak through, lifting our hearts. Other times, the sky remains dark and lowering, and the grass is watered with our tears.
As I am coming up on the anniversary of my mother’s death, these things have been on my mind, along with others who have left us this year—some too young or dearly needed by their families. I try to recall my mother with joy; I know that is what she would have wanted, but I know others who do not have this solace.
As authors, one of the greatest gifts we can give our readers is a glimpse of something beyond this mundane life, something to help them grapple with pain and sadness, to bring comfort.
I felt comforted in such a way recently when I heard a story told by the Irish lecturer, Myrtle Smyth.* It was a story she told to a man sitting beside her on a plane, who was grieving a lost daughter, about a story she told to a little girl who wanted to know why her mother had died. So far as I understand, it is a real story that happened to someone Myrtle knew in Ireland.
The story goes like this:
A woman Myrtle knew lost a little daughter. The woman was devastated, inconsolable. She could not bring herself to go out or visit friends. She drew her curtains, huddled in her home all day, and cried.
One night, after some weeks of this, she had a dream.
In her dream, she saw a procession of little girls, beautiful and angelic, all dressed in white, all singing, all carrying a lit candle.
Except one little girl, hers.
Her little girl stood to one side, and someone, possibly an angel, asked her why she was not singing and why her candle wasn’t lit.
And the little girl replied, “My mother’s tears put out my candle.”
The mother woke up the next morning, and her whole outlook had changed. She was filled with joy and determined to rejoice. She pulled back her curtains, washed her face, and called her friends. She decided to throw a party.
She was determined to celebrate life so that her tears would not weigh upon her little daughter in Heaven.
A few weeks later, she had another dream. This time, she saw the procession of little girls again and walking at the front, leading the others, singing and holding aloft her lit candle was her little girl.
This story made me cry, but it also lifted my spirits. I know my mother would not want me crying on her candle. But hearing this was like a pat on the shoulder, something acknowledging that I was going the right direction by insisting on holding to joy.
This is what stories are for.
As Easter approaches, let us writers pray to be transparent so that God’s beam of sunlight pierces the gloom of worldly thought to fall squarely upon our paper—for all the world to read.
If real life can be this awe-inspiring, surely our fiction should not be less glorious.
* -- Myrtle Smyth was a Christian Science practitioner who lived in Belfast during the Irish “Troubles.” She was strangely involved in the events of the time, not directly, but peripherally in ways that mattered. She was the one who spearheaded the building of the Belfast Beacon of Hope, also called the Thanksgiving Statue, a sixty-four-foot tall, angel-like statue of wires that stands in Thanksgiving Square by the river.
If you wish to hear this story from Myrtle Smyth, in her beautiful Irish accent, go to the below website, pick Human K to Z, scroll down to Smyth, Myrtle, and pick the lecture called Angels.