A Winter's Tale: thoughts for 2010

It is now winter. We are experiencing the coldest and most prolonged winter for 50 years. Snow blankets everything. It is cold - very cold. During this season growth comes to a halt, travel comes to a halt, it is hard to keep warm, wildlife struggles to survive, it is easy to run out of fuel and illness is purged as viruses freeze to death. Christmas is a recent and yet somehow distant memory: we sang ‘In the bleak mid-winter’ and remembered Christ’s birth, forgetting perhaps that he was born in a season when the world was experiencing a long spiritual winter - 400 years since the last prophet had spoken.

Life - as my drummer friend Terl Bryant often reminds us - consists of rhythms, of cycles, of seasons. The human body is ruled by rhythm - every day we sleep and wake, breathe to the pulse of a fragile heart. The planets and stars have their cycles, music is rhythmical, as are the sounds that make up music. But in this modern world of central heating and petrol it is easy to ignore the basic rhythms of life. Instead of sleeping, we party; instead of eating regular meals, we snack. Insulated from the seasons by double-glazing and heated cars, we have become deaf to their rhythm and the fundamental pulse of life.

Winter is not the time to be chopping wood, or checking that the boiler is functional; it is not the time to plant fragile seeds or raise young. It is a time to reflect, to prepare, to live from stored memories and provisions, to look ahead to the coming year and plan for what lies ahead, to look up to the heavers and consider our destiny. Winter teaches us to rest and ponder how fragile we are, and what life means. Winter teaches us that sometimes it is prudent to submit rather than strive.

We also live in a winter of thought - of spirituality. Yes, there are many voices raised in a clamour of brash secularism, or ardent fundamentalism - promising that God is about to move in ways as yet unimagined. Yet these ring hollow and carry little weight. Although recent years have seen awakenings and renewals, the season now, at least on the surface, is a dormant one - as in the days of Eli: ‘the word of the Lord is rare; there are not many visions.’ Does this mean God has abandoned us? I think not. It is rather a time to reflect on the future and decide whether faith is for life, or just for Christmas - whether love is a feeling or a covenant.

In this season you may feel you are not travelling far, or growing much. Your heart may feel cold as if your internal central heating has run dry. You may even, like the birds struggling outside in these freezing temperatures, wonder whether you will survive this season of bitterness and cold east wind.

In this winter, then, reflect on this: that it takes cold weather to kill the viruses that plague us, and that winter - if we submit to his embrace - reminds us that we are not the lords of our own destiny as we would like to believe, but that our times and seasons are in the hands of the one who holds the seasons of the earth in his hands. So let us embrace this winter season knowing that even now the snowdrops are pushing with stubborn life beneath the snow.