Yours is the day, yours also is the night

Yours is the day, yours also is the night; you established the lights and the sun. You have fixed all the bounds of the earth; you made summer and winter. Psalm 74:16,17

The notice in the doctor’s surgery enquired whether winter was getting me down. If it was, I’d apparently got SADS, Seasonal Affective Disorder Syndrome. Well, it’s always nice to have a name for something. Until then, I’d been thinking it was just the grey skies, the cold wind and the damp. Mind you, with my surname it’s not very kind to raise the question whether Winter is getting you down.

On the whole, I’d sooner not know. But in any case, and whether we like it or not, season follows season, and as smart teachers used to say to me, thinking they were the only people to have read Shelley, ‘If Winter’s here, can Spring be far behind’. Without the rigours of winter, how would we appreciate the warmth and sunshine of spring? It makes you feel quite sorry for the deprived residents of Madeira and Barbados, doesn’t it? For the Christian there is the also the wonderful insight of the Psalmist.

None of this is by accident. The Creator’s will brought into being a tiny planet where day follows night and summer (eventually) follows winter; where harvest follows seed-time, where birth follows conception, where laughter follows tears. There is a mystic rhythm to life on earth which is no accident, but part of the way the world is, or rather, part of the way the world was created to be.

One expression of this rhythm is in the Church’s Calendar. This month we slip from Candlemas, and the end of the season of the Incarnation, through the preparatory weeks to Ash Wednesday and the first days of Lent. By then, we may have ash on our foreheads, but there should be daffodils in the churchyard.