BBC Radio 4 2016-06-22

Good morning. We’re just past the Summer solstice, the longest day of the year, which coincided this year with the June full moon, the strawberry moon as it is called. From now on the days will get shorter, until the winter solstice, just before Christmas. I have been working for the last few weeks on our Cathedral Calendar, seeing how the feasts and fasts of the Church fit round the ever-changing year. I could bore on about this for hours because making the liturgy work for real services of worship in real time fascinates me. Our Christian calendar like that of Jews and Muslims depends a lot on the moon. But some important days depend on the sun. The summer solstice is marked by the feast of the birth of John the Baptist which falls tomorrow, and the winter solstice comes just before Christmas. So, John, the forerunner of Jesus is represented by the fading of the sun’s light; Christmas, by the birth of new light. So faith fits its seasons around the cycle of nature. The things of time point to the things of eternity.

I always feel mildly sad when we pass the summer solstice. Especially this year when in southern Britain there has been so much cloud and rain. Living in South Oxford it seems to me that we have hardly seen the sun at all and soon the hours of sunlight will be noticeably fewer. Yet the grass is lush, the berries and fruit are growing in my garden, the weak sun and the driving rain have done their stuff.

There is that in all of us, which struggles with time, which longs for a bit of permanence and stability. Aristotle taught that everything in the universe was seeking a point of rest. But Isaac Newton proved the opposite. Nothing is at rest, everything moves, all the time. The planets round the sun, the earth on its axis, the moon round the earth, the electron round the atom. Nothing is fixed for ever. Yet there is continuity, the cycle repeats, yet it is never exactly the same. Newton thought the universe ran like clockwork but more recent science sees the irregularities and how they produce variety, like the seasons and tides and the occasional strawberry moon. Even a blue moon happens from time to time, when you get two full moons in a single month. There is no permanence to cling to, we have to surf the wave, ride the tide, do the best with the times we live in and the chances we get, because they won’t come again. We cannot know the future, even our best predictions are partial. Yet faith offers me the resource to live creatively in time. The Collect for this Week in the Anglican Calendar points us beyond ourselves asking that we may so pass through the things of time that we lose not the things of eternity. A prayer for all times and all seasons.