The Gift of Mother Bees

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SSA060: A pillar of beeswax gets blessed once a year, carried into a dark church, and then burned away over the next fifty days. That’s the Paschal candle, and the Church has been decorating it, arguing about it and chopping it up for souvenirs since at least the fourth century.

Alix Murray and Kathryn Laffrey open this patrons episode with the history, and it starts with a lamp. The early Christian evening office, the Lucernarium, lit a lamp and sang a hymn of thanks for the light. St. Basil the Great wrote that it didn’t seem right for the Fathers to take the gift of evening light in silence. The candle inherited that job.

By the Middle Ages the blessed candle was a sacramental, and parishes broke the wax into pieces for people to take home against the attacks of the devil. Kathryn sees the tail end of that in her pysanky classes, where students turn up with blessed candle stubs rescued from church and melt them down to write Easter eggs.

Then there’s the Exsultet, the Easter Proclamation the deacon sings at the Vigil, which calls the wax the work of mother bees. Medieval churches wrote it on illuminated scrolls that hung down from the ambo and unrolled as the deacon read, images turned so the congregation could follow along without reading a word. The bee is in there for a reason: the ancients thought the queen bred without mating, so her wax was virgin wax, and the candle reads as Christ himself, the wax his body and the flame his divinity.

The second half is a workshop, and it’s the half you’ll want the video for. Alix walks through the Paschal candle she painted after her pastor asked her to do one for the parish: a sketch, tracing paper rubbed with pastel in place of carbon paper, an underpainting in burnt umber, then color built up in thin layers with drying time in between. Kathryn paints three small hearts on 100% beeswax pillars, one each for the Sacred Heart, the Immaculate Heart and the Chaste Heart of St. Joseph, working all three at once so the underwash stays consistent.

Both keep landing on the same discovery. Wax forgives almost everything. Alix put an extra elbow on the Lamb’s front leg, stared at it for days, and scraped it off with a paring knife. Paint that flaked off in a suitcase went straight back on.

Practical notes run through the whole thing: measure the circumference before you size the image, watch the distortion a flat drawing picks up when it wraps around a cylinder, keep the palette in a zip bag overnight, and give the acrylic real drying time before you touch it again. Kathryn finished all three of hers in about 6 hours.

If you’ve ever looked at the candle by the ambo at Easter and wondered who painted it, this is the episode that tells you how, and why it’s beeswax in the first place.

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