Our little St. Peter’s Church had beautiful stained glass windows. It had a small organ, small choir, but we made good music. Our pastor always believed that we could do big things, even if our congregation was small. Even though it was a task that should be performed by a deacon, he taught me how to sing (chant) the Great Litany during Lent, and it remains one of my favorite service elements of the church year. The significance of The Great Litany is deep: It is the oldest original English language rite, dating to 5th century Romans, it is all-encompassing and focuses prayers for ourselves and for the world, and it is the strongest way to begin “keeping a Holy Lent.”
After the service on Palm Sunday, one of our traditions was to strip all the vestments from the altar, and cover all the icons in the entire nave and sanctuary with purple drapes, to be lifted off on Easter. Our parish was very “Catholic” in a sense – they had a very visible Mary shrine, with many votive candles below her. It is believed that sometime the night of Palm Sunday, one of the purple cotton drapes fell from Mary, and onto the burning candles below. It smoldered and smoked, filling the sanctuary with smoke and keeping the fire as a slow burn. Eventually, the fire slowly spread to the floor and first pews near Mary, but continued as a slow fire, almost like coals or embers, they would say later. The heat within, though was so great as to have melted and distorted the brass candelabras standing on the altar nearby. Late that night, a person who lived nearby was passing by the church and noticed what they thought were some low lights on in the church, and when they peered in a window, saw that there flames near the floor in the corner. They called 911, and the firefighters described the blaze as amazing that it was so hot, yet so muffled by the smoke itself, and they were able to contain it with mostly foam, avoiding lots of water damage, but they had to break out a single stained-glass window by the Mary shrine to get at the source. Opening a main door would likely have caused a huge backdraft and immediate spontaneous combustion explosion. In the end, there was lots of smoke damage, several pews and the floor caved into the basement near the Mary shrine, but a lot less structural damage than the firemen expected to find.
The Mary statue hung on a standard plaster and lath wall, not a brick wall, and immediately on the back side of that plaster wall was the sacristy, a small anteroom where some of the nicest ones of the pastor’s vestments were kept in big, flat drawers, and on top of those drawers, just lying on the top of the table, were the candles set up in preparation for the upcoming Easter services following Holy Week, basically directly behind Mary. Remember that the sanctuary was hot enough to have distorted and melted brass candelabras. Behind a simple wood door and plaster wall, the Paschal Candle lay unblemished. Not melted, not marked, not damaged in any way. We held our Easter Vigil and Easter weekend services at a neighboring church down the street, and we used the Paschal Candle that had been prepped the week before.
Thank you, angels.