Words of Light and Hope from Jane McLarty

Words of Light and Hope

from  Jane McLarty

 

With Christmas day behind us (however we might feel about that) we enter the months that can be the worst, in terms of weather: ‘as the days lengthen, so the cold strengthens’ as the somewhat sinister proverb has it.  Yet in keeping with our theme, there are words of hope even within this saying – the days are lengthening, little by little, and in a matter of weeks we will see the signs of spring, the first snowdrops, the first crocuses.  And in fact of course we are still in the Christmas season, travelling in imagination with the Magi on their way to see the King, born not in a palace as they expected but in a stable. And so Christ overturns human expectation, and continues to do so. It is not in the end power or eminence or fame that saves us, but the love that goes to the darkest places to bring light, the barren places to transform winter into spring.

 

RS Thomas  The Coming

 

And God held in his hand

A small globe. Look he said.

The son looked. Far off,

As through water, he saw

A scorched land of fierce

Colour. The light burned

There; crusted buildings

Cast their shadows: a bright

Serpent, a river

Uncoiled itself, radiant

With slime.

On a bare

Hill a bare tree saddened

The sky. Many People

Held out their thin arms

To it, as though waiting

For a vanished April

To return to its crossed

Boughs. The son watched

Them. Let me go there, he said.