the sanctuary lamp

This is a nice essay by Henry Oliver on Evelyn Waugh, but I want to call attention, as one does, to something I believe is missing. Oliver describes a scene near the end of Brideshead Revisited in which Charles Ryder is visiting the chapel at Brideshead. Here’s what Waugh writes: 

Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame — a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones. 

Oliver says that Waugh’s point here is that “what animates modern civilization is the way the lights burn and the bells ring as they have done throughout Christendom in the one true church.” He goes on to say, “There is only one light left burning at the end of this book of shadows: not the lights of Oxford, not the sparkles of diamonds, not the candlelit beauty of Brideshead house, but the lamp in the chapel.” 

What Oliver may not know is that this is a sanctuary lamp: the candle lit next to the tabernacle, that is, the receptacle (usually in a niche in a wall) where the consecrated Host is kept. It is typically, though not always, distinguished from other lights in the church by being placed in a red glass chimney, thus the “small red flame.” 

John Betjeman, in his poem “In Willesden Churchyard,” evokes the same mystery. Walking through that churchyard, he realizes that “the Blessed Sacrament / Not ten yards off in Willesden parish church / Glows with the present immanence of God.”

Now, to be sure, Waugh thought that because Betjeman’s Catholicism was Anglo rather than Roman he was going to Hell — and often told him so. (“Awful about your obduracy in schism and heresy. Hell hell hell. Eternal damnation.”) But that’s not the point here.

The point here is that the light that Waugh invokes at the end of Brideshead is not just any old religious candle — any old light in a church, even in a chapel of the One True Church — but the light that marks the presence of the consecrated Host, the bread transformed into the flesh of Christ, “the present immanence of God.” This is why in many churches people do not pass the tabernacle, when the candle it lit to indicate its contents, without bowing. This, we may infer, is what Charles Ryder does that morning in the Brideshead chapel.