During the prolonged period of snow and frost last winter we were accustomed to hearing that nobody could remember a winter as hard as that. Of course, if you had spent some time abroad you could indeed have experience much worse. I had. I spent one winter in southern Austria and the snow came early in October and it was close to the end of April before it departed. The snow was at least two feet high by the sides of the road and the churches were not heated. Indeed the water was heated before Mass so that it would not be frozen by the time the priest added a to the wine in the chalice at the Offertory.
In those circumstances spring came late but when it came it was with a glorious burst of colour. Even now, over forty years later, I remember vividly a Mass I celebrated on a mountain top as soon as it was free of snow, in an old church built of thick black stone. Outside the whole mountain top was ablaze with the vivid yellow of the newly blossomed daffodils. Inside it was dark except for another golden glow from the fair hair of what seemed innumerable Austrian children. And the church seemed to radiate with their golden voices as they sang through the whole of Mass. I have never forgotten that Mass and the joy of the singing. After the deadness of the long winter the brilliance of spring spoke resurrection glory with God, out of the darkness of our pain and exhaustion, bringing new life and joy back into our lives.
We are ceaselessly told that God works to bring good out of the pain in our lives. Someone familiar with the original language tells me that the word for works might be better translated as toils or indeed sweats. But it is only when we experience the newness of spring, and see the wonder of brilliant new colour, and hear the thrill of young voices singing in joy, maybe only then do we begin to grasp what it means. And God knows, there is enough of pain in our lives today, and we need to hear again the song of the resurrection.
The Jesuit Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was subject to depression and he wrote of a world he saw as, ‘bleared, smeared with toil / And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell’ but he had the faith to see it as continually being created, or as he so memorably put it, ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God / Always with the Holy Spirit brooding over it with warm breast and with bright wings.’