Sermon Archive
The hounds of spring are on winter's traces
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Evensong on 4 February 2007
Genesis 1:1-2:3 ; Revelation 21:9-22:5
'The hounds of spring are on winter's traces', wrote the Romantic Pre-Raphaelite Algernon Charles Swinburne in one of his poems. I first read these words years ago when I was a schoolboy, not however in Swinburne's poem, but in the caption to a cartoon by the American humorist James Thurber. The cartoon depicts a snowy day with scudding clouds. A glum little man, well wrapped against the cold, is sitting on a motionless child's sledge. He is holding one end of a lead loosely attached to a large dog, who is sitting contemplatively and apparently half asleep. A large woman, wrapped in furs and with a long scarf streaming behind her, dashes past on skates. The man cups his ear to hear what the woman is telling him. "I Said", she shouts angrily, "the Hounds of Spring Are on Winter's Traces - But Let it Pass, Let it Pass."
The quirky humour of Thurber's cartoons is all his own and almost impossible to reproduce in words. In another, a vivacious young woman, lying on the summer grass with flowers in her hand, addresses a puzzled looking passing clergyman: "There's no Use You Trying to Save Me, My Good Man" she tells him. But my favourite Thurber cartoon is a drawing of a very strange animal sent in to a pet advice bureau, with the question: "Our gull cannot get his head down any farther than this, and bumps into things". To which the advice bureau replies: "You have no ordinary gull to begin with. He looks to me a great deal like a rabbit backing up. If he is a gull, it is impossible to keep him in the house. Naturally he will bump into things. Give him his freedom."
Again, without seeing the cartoon itself, most of humour that appealed to my adolescent mind is lost. But suffice it to say that, lodged by Thurber in the recesses of my memory, Swinburne's words came back to me last Friday as I took our dog Tess for her morning walk in the gardens. After an unseasonably mild January, February was beginning with just a hint of frost. Above the bare trees, the sky was high, blue and cloudless, and Fife and the Ochills were clear in the distance. Snowdrops were clustering and in the lengthening days the first shoots of daffodils were appearing. The hounds of spring had now at least some traces of winter to overtake.
But for how many more years would that continue? The radio earlier that morning had been full of the latest international scientific report on climate change caused by human activity. Could the human race change its ways in time to prevent further global warming? The jury was out. But the scientists seemed to be saying that changes in our lifestyle, and particularly reduction in our use of energy were essential. There was a decidedly uncomfortable aspect to this however. Part of the problem is that many more people, in our own society and in the developing economies of China and India for example, are aspiring to an energy-consuming standard of living which was formerly enjoyed by the wealthy few. In global terms, we are the wealthy few. What right has Dives to demand restraint of Lazarus?
All this came to mind on that brief winter walk last Friday morning. But another thought also occurred. There was something in the frosty air that provoked memories. On a number of occasions over the years, I have been fortunate enough to visit other countries in Europe, and some of these visits have been in winter. That something in the frosty air reminded me in particular of a winter visit to an old monastery near Hannover in the north of Germany, and of another to the city of Göteborg on the east coast of Sweden. What it brought back to me from both of these visits was the feeling that I - and perhaps other people too - often have, when arriving in a new place for the first time: fascination with its strangeness, its difference from scenes dulled by familiarity, so much to learn about its topography, traditions, buildings and inhabitants; and underlying all, a sense of one's horizons expanding, a sense of life's possibilities, filled not so much with identifiable hopes, but with hope itself.
That remembered sense of hope and possibility, provoked by something in last Friday morning's frosty air, lasted for just a few moments. But while it lasted, I realised that it was not just a memory. It was not only in those winter visits abroad that hope and possibility came alive. They were coming alive too here and now in Edinburgh: the horizons of this city, dulled by familiarity, also for a moment expanded, and there was something hopeful in the frosty air. Like all such moments it was soon overtaken by the need to get back from my walk to the daily round, the common task. But perhaps this momentary insight, into the unrealised richness of familiar scenes and people, was part of something much more significant - part of what T S Eliot meant when he wrote that 'the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.'
Two further thoughts are now suggested by that experience last Friday. One is that the problem of climate warming, or at least that aspect of it caused by mass tourism, might be eased if fewer people assumed that what broadens the mind and refreshes the body and spirit, is not travel in itself, but the mind and spirit in which the body travels - at home as much as abroad. But maybe that is the kind of advice you can give only to yourself, especially if your own travels already have contributed to global warming - and also, again, because it sounds too much like the advice of Dives to Lazarus.
The other thought however might be suggested less diffidently. That favourite cartoon by Thurber which I mentioned earlier - the drawing of a very strange animal which might have been either a gull getting its head down to avoid bumping into things, or a rabbit backing up - illustrates much the same point that is made in textbooks of psychology by a drawing which looked at one way is of two heads in profile facing one another, but looked at another way is a goblet or chalice. What we choose to see can depend on how we look: our perception is often selective, and indeed perhaps always selective, because we can never see everything at once. And if this is true of our visual perception, it is also true of how we see the world emotionally and spiritually, in the light, or in the absence, of hope and possibility.
To illustrate this, let me go back to the author of the words I began with, the Romantic Pre-Raphaelite poet Swinburne. Another of his well known lines is: 'Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from Thy breath'. Now it is not difficult to understand how Swinburne, a nineteenth-century aesthete, intoxicated with language and love of the senses, could describe Christ in this way. He lived in the Victorian age, when the Church often appeared, and sometimes was, repressive, puritanical and prudish. He was not the first, nor the last, to perceive Christianity as life-denying; and that perception, as much as anything else I suspect, has been responsible for many people abandoning the Church during the last hundred years. The perception of religion as life-denying pervades much popular twentieth century culture, and is reflected, however whimsically, in Thurber's vivacious young woman telling the puzzled clergyman: "There's no Use You Trying to Save Me, My Good Man".
But this perception of Christ as the 'pale Galilean', of course, is just that - a selective perception, which for countless Christians seems a profound misperception of Christ's life-enhancing good news. It is still true, of course, that if some dogmatic and unimaginative Christians had their way, the world might well grow grey from their breath. But today the world is equally likely to grow grey from the breath of dogmatic and unimaginative secularists, who reduce human horizons to what can be known by our five senses, and deny that there is more to us than we know.
Yet precisely that - that there is more to us than we know - is what the Galilean promises, and with him all true prophets, priests and philosophers of the great world religions. And the sense of possibility that surprises us in the midst of life, refreshing even those scenes most dulled by familiarity, is an invitation to trust that what they promise is true. Where that sensed possibility will eventually lead us, what we ultimately hope for, is hidden from us - otherwise it would no longer be possibility. That sensed possibility is, rather, possibility itself, to be worked out and wrestled with in all the changing scenes of life, in success and in failure, in activity and in suffering, in relationship and in solitariness. The hope that arises, new every morning, and for many even as death approaches, is too profoundly real a part of the human condition to dismiss as mere wishful thinking.
The ever-widening horizons of this hope and possibility are sketched in our two scripture readings tonight. Genesis and Revelation were written by men, in the thought forms and culture of their times. But an eternal word and enduring meaning shines through what they tell us about life and light. Genesis tells us that our life under the sun is no mere accident in time and space, but is given to us, with all its hope and possibility, by the living source of life and light, too bright for mortal vision. And Revelation assures us that this gift has not been given in vain. When 'the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time', we shall 'need no light of lamp or sun' to know that everything that God has made is good.
Is it sensible even to entertain these unbounded intimations of hope and possibility? Is it not wiser to live within the narrower horizons of what we know? But human hope and possibility continually overflow our narrow horizons, and it is only by the artifice of keeping busy and being distracted by many things that we contain our eternal longings. Is true wisdom to be found by being closed, or by being open, to infinite possibility? There is no theoretical answer to that question. Only the practical invitation of the thirty-fourth Psalm: 'O taste, and see, how gracious the Lord is'. Or as the seventeenth century versifiers put it: 'O make but trial of his love' and 'experience will decide...'
Worship >> Sermons >> Sermons