I’m a great fan of the radio comedy improvisation show, I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue. Along with many others, I used to love the way that the jazz musician, Humphrey Lyttleton, presented the programme before his death not so long ago with his dry, dead-pan humour, conveying at one and the same time both that - apparently - he’d rather be doing almost anything else in the world at that moment, and also that he was loving every minute of it.

‘Humph’, of course, is irreplaceable, but others have now valiantly stepped in to his very large shoes to have a go at presenting the show.

I particularly remember a Christmas broadcast in which the panellists, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, Barry Cryer and - as I recall - Willie Rushton not long before his sad and rather early death, had to compose a letter, one word each at a time in turn, from the Queen. It was hilarious, as was the final item in the show: all four of them doing their appalling best to perform the song Winter Wonderland on swanny whistles and kazoos!

Some of those who bought the recently issued Christmas CD by the Gentlemen of St John’s College, Cambridge, will have heard a rather more sophisticated arrangement of the same song!

The recent heavy falls of snow have had the song ringing in my ears. Some of you may remember the lyrics of the first verse:

There’s no doubt that for children especially the snow was just magical and there was plenty of evidence of them enjoying it, something to which a later verse of the song alludes:

 

I understand, however, that it wasn’t small children who built the magnificent snowman by the War Memorial in the Market Square but more adult ‘children’ from The Crown! The magnificent snow sculpture was justifiably featured on local radio and television news.

One day not long after the snow had fallen I made sure that I went up on to the Common to enjoy the view. It was truly stunning. The snow was like a vast pristine white carpet with sunlight glistening, dancing and sparkling on it. It was utterly beautiful. And as I took in the wonderful scene I was aware, too, that for many - particularly the elderly and the infirm - the snow was rather more of a damned nuisance – and for some that’s probably putting it rather mildly! This tension, however, between the delight in the snow on the one hand and finding it trying on the other, spoke to me, as it were, of something far more profound in our experience than things simply being opposites. Often the snow was both beautiful, delightful and fun, and also irksome, dangerous and undesirable at the same time.

The most common way of experiencing life and of speaking about it is in terms of opposites: good and bad, right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, and so on. At one level this is often necessary and works well, especially for people at a relatively young age needing to get their bearings in the world, but in such cases we experience life very much as black and white, as hard at the edges. As we grow, though, we begin to discover that life is rather more complex than that. This isn’t a matter of becoming all wishy-washy; rather it’s about getting to know reality as it is instead of trying to make reality fit into our narrow and inadequate frameworks. And this has everything to do with God, who is far beyond our own narrow and limited ways of understanding reality and relating to it.

I wonder, for example, how many of us have tales to tell of tragedy, disappointment or disaster of one kind or another. At the time, we might well have thought that our world was falling apart or even that life was no longer worth living. Yet some will almost certainly be able to tell of how they were seemingly changed for the better by such occurrences, of how they were opened up to greater depths of love or compassion or service of others. It doesn’t always happen like this for everyone; some are left deeply wounded, paralysed or shattered by what has happened, but the point that I’m making is that we often jump to premature conclusions about what’s good or bad, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable.

Someone who has influenced me a great deal through his writings, as many of you know, is Fr Bede Griffiths, the English, Roman Catholic, Benedictine monk, who spent half of his life in India. During his time in India, he saw his main task simply as a human being to be about the reconciliation of opposites in the experience of what in Indian philosophy and spirituality is referred to as advaita or non-duality. His search was for the unity of all things in God beyond the divisions that we are prone to erect. Towards the end of his life he suffered a stroke, which, he said, led to a deeper and greater experience of the unity of all things in the love of God than anything else in his life had given him. It would have been quite natural and understandable for him to have said that the stroke was bad or unwelcome but Fr Bede found a place even for that which on the surface level seemed to be destructive.

In his book, The New Creation in Christ: Meditation and Community, he wrote this,

‘The forces in the unconscious can be terribly destructive, but they can also be creative. We must never forget the evil forces but we must always remember that all our destructive forces are potentially creative. There is always something good in them, and if you can discover the hidden good, you can release the evil from them and they become creative. One should not want to destroy sin, therefore. Sin always has something good in it. If we can release the good, then the evil with which we started will depart. We do not overcome darkness by fighting it but simply by bringing it into the light. Jesus has taken all our wounds and darkness to the Father and so brought about our final reconciliation. Meditation must always be an encounter with the risen Lord who has reconciled us to the Father in the Spirit. The redeeming Christ loves and understands us, shares our feelings and has complete compassion for us. We don’t, of course, have to think of all this when we are meditating; but total surrender in love involves immersion in the depths of the Spirit, who is love, who brings about this reconciliation in Christ and takes us back to the Father, the Source.’

As I write this we are still in the Christmas-Epiphany season, as indeed we shall be still when you are reading it, yet beyond little more than two weeks or so of the publication of the magazine we shall be in the season of Lent and the run-up to Holy Week and Easter. Liturgically, we go from the birth of a child in the Christmas-Epiphany season to the suffering, death and resurrection of a fully-grown man in the Lent-Easter season in a matter of a few weeks. In all these things, the birth, suffering, death and resurrection of Christ, God is present and active, and it’s precisely because of this, because of God’s presence in the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ alike, that God shatters our humanly-created images, concepts and understanding of him. We are invited to let God be God and, in so doing, to discover the unity at the heart of all things.
So snow, too, has its place!