Always Winter?

Huw Williams | 13:05, Wednesday 01 February 2012 | Turin, Italy

The weather websites tell me the temperature is currently -2, and I have no problem believing it! Even as I type the flakes are starting to fall again outside the window. With temperatures due to fall further in the next few days it seems as though the much-delayed 'proper' Winter has arrived. The skiers will be pleased and so will those who depend on their business. For others of course, it's not so great – people worried about heating their homes, people like the old man we passed yesterday trying to walk down the road without taking a tumble, not to mention those who don’t even have the luxury of somewhere to call 'home' at all.

I live with enough privileges to be able to enjoy the snow, and the beautifully bleak snow-transformed cityscapes I see from a tram window, but even I know what it means to look forward to Spring. So it has been timely that I have recently taken up again my copy of CS Lewis' Essays. It's one of the books on my shelf I go back to most often.

For Lewis, the changing seasons provided a continuous pointer to the greater reality which lay behind them, the gospel. (Remember 'always Winter and never Christmas'?) And so it was with a new appreciation that I re-read his wonderful piece, "The Grand Miracle" and it's beautiful closing lines:-

"To be sure, it feels wintry enough still: but often in the very early spring it feels like that. Two thousand years are only a day or two by this scale. A man really ought to say, ‘The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago’ in the same spirit in which he says, 'I saw a crocus yesterday.' Because we know what is coming behind the crocus. The spring comes slowly down this way; but the great thing is that the corner has been turned. There is, of course, this difference, that in the natural spring the crocus cannot choose whether it will respond or not. We can. We have the power either of withstanding the spring, and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going on into those 'high mid-summer pomps' in which our Leader, the Son of man, already dwells, and to which He is calling us. It remains with us to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer."