Dear Friends,
February is one of my favourite months. It’s the last one of meteorological winter, but also usually the driest and coldest, giving those clear crisp days that beckon you outside. White carpets of snowdrops nod gently in the woodlands, crocuses start colouring the garden, and daffodils begin to sunlight the roadsides. On bright mornings birdsong fills the air for the first time and the days are noticeably longer. The early lambs appear in the fields and the awakening of the good earth begins. Signs of resurrection after the stillness of winter. Plus its my birthday.
The year is still new, and a new year brings the hope of new beginnings, a reflection of the soil, of which we are made, once again giving birth to new life. But although the deepest days of winter occur around the solstice in the second half of December, and so you might expect that to signify a new beginning, the New Year number used to change on 25th March until 1752. So you had 24th March 1649 and the next day was 25th March 1650. Why 25th March? Because its exactly nine months before the 25th December – Christmas Day, the day of Jesus’ birth. It’s the day on which the Church celebrates the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary (called ‘The Annunciation’) to announce to her she had been chosen to bear God’s Son, and to which she said ‘yes’ (known as Mary’s Fiat). That was the day the world changed. The Holy Spirit overshadowed her and she became pregnant without impregnation. God was to be born as one of us. And so the world chose to change its year on that date because it really did herald a new beginning and a renewed hope, not due to our own doomed ‘new year resolutions’, or the arbitrary turning of a page on the calendar, but because, beyond anything we could hope for, or do for ourselves, God’s help was coming.
Help and hope are desperately needed. There are so many who are struggling in our parishes at the moment. For some, its finances; for some its relationships that are breaking, or have broken, down; for some it’s sheer loneliness or the heartache of grief; for some it’s the terror of being abused at the whim of someone near; and for others its unending chronic pain, or the fear of impending death as the years process, or the diagnosis of a potentially terminal illness. Often these are carried in silence. They are the unshared, sometimes unshareable, burdens.
We often use the terms ‘battling’ and ‘fighting’ when speaking about illness, as if there was some kind of violence with which we can counter our difficulties. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night…Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ as Dylan Thomas wrote. It speaks of a spirit of defiance in the face of death, a fist-shaking, despite the inevitability of our mortality. But raging against death is as useful as King Lear’s shouting at the sea. It is born out of a terror of the blankness of unfaith, an utter fear that there is nothing beyond. It belongs to a world that, paradoxically, denies the human spirit, and that has fallen for the ruse that life is mere biological mechanics. The deeper trouble with this attitude, however, is that it blinds us to the opportunity of preparing for the inescapable, to make our peace with God and with each other, and thus with ourselves. Compare it to St Francis of Assisi:
And thou, most kind and gentle death, / waiting to hush our latest breath,
O praise him, alleluia!
Thou leadest home the child of God, / and Christ our Lord the way hath trod.
Here is the changed world that the turning of the year on the 25th March celebrated, a world carved with hope, and no longer enthralled to fear. It’s a world awash with peace and joy and quietness and love, in which we can rest.
I’m writing all this about the New Year in March in a letter for February. Why? Because this is the month between the years, as it were, when we’re in the old year and the new year at the same time. The new and the not-yet-new. And it seems to me that this is a space in which we live much of our lives. It’s the story of the Gospel of Jesus, and a metaphor of baptism; baptism signifies our death to the claims, goals, and rules of this world, and a birth into God’s universe, which operates by a very different vision of what life is all about, where Love is the force of life. But it’s a universe we still wait to see, one for which we hope. And there you have it. Hope. Not the ‘hope’ that comes from a degraded and demonic understanding of the world where ‘might is right’ and resentment is seen as a virtue, but the Hope that comes from a knowledge that Love has eaten Death from the inside out, and Risen again. Its a quiet, gentle, vulnerable Love, born in a dark stable, unnoticed by the world; a Love that is, at the same time, fierce, loyal and unyielding; a Love that treads to the farthest, darkest, loneliest corners of the world, and the soul, to reach out a hand to those cowering in fear and say ‘Come, my child, you’re safe now’. And I have yet to meet anyone who, deep inside, doesn’t long to hear those words. That’s a Hope worth living for. That’s a Hope worth dying for.
Your friend and priest,
Robert.
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