The Candle in the Window

(The Guider of Souls)

I’m sorry about the photo.

I wish it were better.  I wish I could do it justice.  I have taken many, many photos of this illumined window in an old Maine farmhouse, and this is the best I’ve ever gotten.  It will have to suffice.  But let me tell you about her, and then maybe you will understand.

She is a very old woman

who lives in an even older farmhouse.  There’s no farming done there anymore, though.  Those days are long gone.  More like buried, actually.  Interred.  People know “of” her, but no one these days can really say they know her directly.  I’m afraid she’s a bit of living history now, and not the historical role play people do nowadays, but the real McCoy.  She is history.

We know these people by the light placed in their window at night.  It used to be a real candle.  You could tell by the flickering quality—not the fake electrical flickering some modern bulbs have today, but the real movement of real fire, the Sun’s energy trapped in a little tool we use to remind ourselves in the dark of night that we are still alive.  But nowadays most people use an electric candle, soft and steady, and it will have to do.

Every night, the candle is lit,

but not just in her house.  There are old houses everywhere, dotting the old roads if you care to walk them.  Take a trip in the twilight and watch the little lights come on one by one.  Often, the rest of the house is completely dark, but the candle is still lit.  And it’s not on a timer, either.  Someone lights it.

And someone puts it out in the morning.  It’s a regular cycle, one you can count on.  It’s part of the rhythm of her life.  When you see it, you know a Guider of Souls lives in the house.

There are those who say that the candle in the window is for weary sojourners, for those lost in the night or in a storm.  Mayhap this was true at one point, but it rarely is now—and certainly not for the lady in question.  There are not many people who travel the old roads, and most definitely not at night.

Yet these candles are still guides.

They still offer light and hope, but they are not for the living anymore.  They are for those who have passed on.  To let them know that she still thinks of them.  That she still loves them.  That if they’re wandering in the cold night, looking for the warmth of the life they once knew, she is there and waiting for them.

They guide the wandering souls now, not the wandering living people.  These days the wandering living people are far too lost to help anymore.  And anyway, they no longer search for the light and they don’t want any help.  The candle in the window is different.  It’s for the soul of the recently or not so recently passed person.

Because there were people she loved.

And even though nowadays we only know “of” her and no one actually knows her anymore, at some point, at some time, someone did know her.

In the old farmhouse, there was laughter and love.  There were trials and difficulties.  Sometimes there was fighting or bitterness because that’s a natural part of life, too. If the walls could talk . . . what would they say?  They’d talk of marriages.  (And hushed divorces.)  The birth of children, the schooling, the betrothing, the holidays, the victories and defeats, the death of loved ones . . .

Loved ones who still need a guiding light . . .

I was curious.

So I looked into it a bit.  One site said the tradition of putting a candle in the window started in the late 1600s when the British imposed harsh Penal Laws on the Irish Catholics.  The candle was a secret symbol to priests that they could quietly enter the house and say mass.

Another site said it’s a Colonial Williamsburg tradition borrowed from Bostonians who used to place a candle in the window of places that were open to the public during the holidays.  Colonial Williamsburg didn’t have any one set tradition, and so they made this their holiday tradition, which persists to this day.

Yet another site said the candle in the window represents freedom in Denmark and dates to the mid-1900s, when the German troops surrendered in WWII.  Now they place a candle in the window every May 4th to celebrate it.

It seems everyone has a reason for the candle.

But for the old woman in the farmhouse, it’s not about Penal Laws in the 1600s or a holiday celebration in the winter or freedom.  It’s about the dead.  It’s about guiding souls.  It’s about remembering.  It’s about hearing the old songs echoing in the old farmhouse and who said what to whom and how it felt.  It’s about saying, “I’ll never forget you.”

So every night, the candle is lit.  And every morning it is extinguished, when the sun takes over and guides the world again and protects the people from the forces of the night.

One little candle in a window.

And all the forces of darkness gathered to the highest mountain in their most terrifying aspect cannot put it out.  Try though they may, huff and puff and threaten, they cannot blow her house down.  Or stop the guiding of souls.

So if you are inclined of an eve, take a quiet walk down a quiet country road.  As the night closes in and the road disappears into the darkness, all around you the tiny points are lit one by one.  Welcome sojourner, they say.  There is rest here for a weary soul.

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