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Good morning.

One snowy night in January, I left my sister’s house in the country and was driving along the narrow road down the hill to the village.  A big rabbit suddenly appeared in my headlights.  It froze for a second, then blundered forward instead of jumping back into the field.

My tyres crunched in the snow as I inched forward, waiting for the rabbit to find its escape route.  Suddenly it darted to the right, and slipped back through the fence. I turned my head as I passed, and the snow was so white in the darkness that I could see it bounding beautifully across the field, away into the bitter, hard night.

In such moments, this seems an improbable world.  I’m driving home to a warm house, while another living creature is scampering across a cold field to wherever it shelters under the earth. I’m walking along a street at dusk; a fox is suddenly there. It stops, turns to me, then trots across the road and slips into the shadows.  A watchful heron is hunched on the far bank of the canal: when I come near, it lifts into the air and flaps away lazily. It waits for me as I walk again.

Mostly our daily world is familiar, predictable.  Human and humdrum. Then a parallel world nudges closer, and steps into view. And you see what familiarity has blurred. A world wild with life.  Not like us, not of us.  And, experienced in a certain mood or moment, wondrous.   

Our prayer is in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

All things counter, original, spare, strange  ….
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him. Amen.