I am banned from cycling in misty conditions. This followed a rather painful altercation with some construction fencing that had strayed into the road at the bottom of a long downward incline. On a grey morning, in grey weather, and against a grey road-surface, the grey fencing didn’t register: until I hit it. Suddenly, I was sailing through the air, extending my left arm ahead of me, a reflex action of protection, and landed painfully some yards ahead of the now stationary bike. A lorry driver stopped. Dazed and disorientated I got myself up, beginning to feel an intense pain in my left shoulder. With all the ridiculous desire of an Englishman not wanting to make a fuss, I declined all offers of assistance, placed my bike out of the way, and decided to get a bus towards the hospital where I worked. Once there I went to my office in order to get changed before presenting myself at A&E (one has to have standards). I thought I had broken my shoulder but, it turned out, I had broken the fifth metacarpal of my left hand in two places. I soon learned that it’s an injury called “boxer’s fracture”. At a later date, casting an uncertain eye over me, a surgeon (who clearly didn’t feel I fitted his image of a pugilist) asked me how I acquired the breaks. He suggested that perhaps I should desist from cycling in the future.

Low mist across a ploughed field, near Linton-on-Ouse, October 2024

I did not follow the consultant’s advice, although I have made it a general rule not to ride me bike when visibility is impaired. However, last week, setting out on a beautifully clear sunlit morning in York, I began to encounter misty conditions on the outskirts of the city. Weighing up the likelihood that conditions would improve I pressed on to my planned destination of the Aldwark Toll Bridge, about 15 miles from the centre of York. As I anticipated, when the sun got higher the mist receded and it turned into the kind of bright and clear autumnal day which is the muse of poets. Down country lanes the landscape spoke of the changing season: ploughed fields with the dark earth turned in readiness for growth to come. Trees beginning to bear a foliage of yellow, bronze and green-become-gold.

What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

Extract from Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens

It would be very hard to live without this cycle of outer change. In the northern hemisphere they are part and parcel of my spirituality. Within the altering length of days, and the transitions of spring and autumn, Western Christianity has moulded itself into the furniture of the seasons. From the heavenly sparks of Michaelmas, with the equinox behind us, to the remembrance of All Saints and All Souls, liturgy marches to the tune of a changing year. Over the past three decades I have taken funerals in autumn that have a particular poignancy – of change and decay – with a need, somehow, to return home before the darkness falls. A time to comfort one another in a season that tells us, as all seasons do, that while they might occupy a span of time, they can also be a mood; an atmosphere; and a state of being, which greets us on any given day. Divinity is not only something that comes to us in silence. Nor is she confined to some specific time of the year. God is in all these seasons, and the spirit of all these seasons dwells in us.