17 January Light

Passage for reflection: Psalm 139: 7 - 12

They say next Monday, 17 January, is the most depressing day of the year. It’s known as Blue Monday. It’s the day when the financial pressure of the Christmas just past hangs over us most, the weather is at its worst, and the extra pounds we’ve acquired over the holiday season are proving harder to shift than we anticipated. The daily grind just gets us down. 

I’ve spent the last few days with people who are facing really hard stuff at the moment: uncertainty, illness, challenges ahead, and bereavement. I’ve five funerals to take in the next fortnight. The world seems a hard place to be at the moment. The numbers down with Covid, even if it is milder than before, are rising. There’s real anger about parties being held at 10 Downing Street in May 2020 when we weren’t allowed to mix and people couldn’t see dying loved ones or visit those in need. There are people with real financial worries and there are others who are fearful about the future. There’s a lot of darkness about. Blue Monday? More like Blue January. 

After visiting a family to prepare for a funeral the other night I went back to the car and noticed the lights of the cathedral shining down the street above it. The light of Christ is always above, ahead, and around us. When we think the darkness and the state of our lives is all we have, God comes. Remember the old hymn: “Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while they sing. It is the Lord who rises with healing in his wings.”

Psalm 139 is one of the most beautiful of the Psalms. It reminds us very powerfully of the nature of God. The theologian Paul Tillich once said it is the reality of our human condition to run from God, to be on our own, to live in the world as if God were not here. He argued it is not God whom we reject and forget, but rather some distorted picture of God. The God who is really God is inescapable. There is, he said, “no place to which we can run or flee from God, which is outside of God.”

To me, this is a huge comfort on grey and difficult days like perhaps Monday will be. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness shall not ever put it out. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Even the darkness isn’t a thing that we need fear because God is in it. There’s a lot of “how do we get through Monday” articles in the papers and on line this weekend. Maybe we need to remember the eternal light which shines into difficulty, into uncertainty and into bereavement. We don’t need to wait for Sue Gray to tell us this after an enquiry, it is a truth for every day we can know now.

And maybe to get through hard days we need to be the light for others. I’ve sat and heard five stories of people who’ve clearly made a difference to others through the way they lived their lives. So as we celebrate in the next two weeks, Vanessa and Dorothy and Bob and Barbara and Sheila, we also celebrate God.

The funeral I’m doing on Monday will include this poem by Longfellow. There was a tiny pink post it note in the funeral plan which has “to be read” on it. I think Longfellow is saying we need to live life to be full and in doing so we make a difference to others. Read it and see what you think. I don’t know what you are doing on Monday. Let’s hope for light to surprise us to enable us not just to get through it but to remember every day it never goes out. 

What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
   "Life is but an empty dream!"
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
   And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
   And the grave is not its goal;
"Dust thou art, to dust returnest,"
   Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
   Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
   Finds us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
   And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
   Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
   In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
   Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
   Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,--act in the living Present!
   Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
   We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
   Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
   Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
   Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
   With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing
   Learn to labour and to wait.