January is awful. It’s cold. It’s miserable. And above all it’s dark. It’s a month when I don’t see daylight at home between Sunday afternoon and Saturday morning. It’s a month when my students get ill and don’t come to class. It’s a month when the next month is February, which, to be perfectly frank, hardly seems any better.
So, I don’t care what TS Eliot said, April is not the cruelest month. January is.
Earlier in this mean-spirited month, when we were promised the spectacle of a superbloodwolfmoon, I was excited to think that it would be out in all its bloody, lupine glory just as I was heading off to get the bus to work. But no. It was cloudy. It was dark. Of course it was. It was January.
And yet.
And yet, in the middle of all this darkness, my friends Jess and Adam were married at a beautiful service, after which they threw a wonderful party full of joy and old friends.
And in the middle of all this darkness, I found myself welcomed to stay with my friends Annie and Chris on nights when the late hour and foul weather made travelling too horrible to contemplate.
In the Bible, darkness is described in physical terms: it is thick, it is a dense canopy, it can be felt.
But darkness in the Bible is also always accompanied by light: God himself is a lamp to lighten the darkness. Christians believe that no matter how thick and deep and dark the darkness becomes, it will never overcome the light.
And it’s not just in January that it’s good to remember that. We seem to be living in a time when darkness of all kinds surrounds us. That it’s January simply provides a physical darkness to underline the metaphor.
But yesterday, when I got off the bus, I realized that the bike ride from the bus station to the Museum was now done in daylight. The enveloping darkness of the New Year had already started to recede.
I really should have remembered that it would, long before then, at Adam and Jess’s shining January wedding: the light shines in the darkness, no matter how dark – and the darkness will not overcome it. So long, then, January. We overcame you. You won’t be missed.
This was the first Pause for Thought I did with Zoe Ball.
Jess and Adam’s wedding was truly excellent.
The image is of a superbloodwolfmoon.