Blow Out the Candle in the Corner

 

(Mark 7:1–8, 14–15, 21–23)

They say that in an ancient monastery, the monks began their evening prayer by lighting a candle in one corner of the chapel. No one really knew why.
It was tradition.
One day, a new abbot became curious and searched through the monastery archives. There he found a note written three centuries earlier:

“Light the candle in the corner so the cat won’t jump onto the altar during prayer.”

The cat was long gone, yet the candle was still lit every evening—faithfully, reverently, and without question.
How easily that happens in faith too: gestures once alive with meaning slowly turn into empty repetitions when we forget why they began.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus meets good and devout men, lovers of the Law. Yet their hearts had become trapped in rules. They had turned purity into obsession and faith into inspection.
They washed their hands, but not their hearts.
They honored the ritual, but lost sight of the God behind it.

And the Lord, with the calm authority of a healer, says:

“Nothing that enters from outside can defile a person; it is what comes out from within that makes one unclean.”

The dust on our hands doesn’t stain the soul—
but pride, envy, and resentment do.
Jesus does not reject tradition; He redeems it. He returns it to its source: love.

True tradition is not a chain that binds us, but a root that nourishes.
It exists not to keep us repeating lifeless gestures,
but to remind us why we believe, whom we serve, and for whom we live.

Perhaps we too have our own “candles in the corner”—things we do simply because “that’s how it’s always been done.”
Today, the Lord invites us to ask:
Does this draw me closer to Him… or only quiet my conscience?

Faith is not afraid to get its hands dirty for love’s sake.
True purity is not in the water on our skin, but in the fire of the Spirit that cleanses the heart.

And when that fire burns within us,
there’s no need to light candles to scare away cats—
for our whole life becomes an altar.