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On Thursday night I was outside struggling to access my gas meter, hidden as it is by an overgrown bush; snow was falling in the darkness, which spurred me on to get that reading - and ensure I didn’t have to pay a penny more than I needed, to those I felt might need it less.

We’ve crossed a threshold this week that affects us all, and it’s one that very few will welcome: a threshold to bills that will be on average 54 per cent higher, for now - and a threshold to who knows where beside, though at the moment it feels like a one-way ticket to the 1970s.

I was reading on social media last night a man’s urgent request for advice for his elderly neighbour. She’s just been diagnosed with inoperable cancer, lives on her own. He saw her through the window, wrapped in a blanket, refusing to put the heating on …

Many people were urging her, in their replies, just to heat the house and leave the debt when she goes - but she was old school he said. She had values.

This is a social moment as it was described yesterday on this programme. It’s a spiritual moment, too, I’d say - one that could summon the ‘Woe to you!’ spirit of Biblical prophecy - ‘Do not oppress the widow or the poor …’ - as well as the invitation to each of us, in Zechariah’s words, ‘to show mercy and compassion to one another’. To be part of the solution.

If there’s a silver lining to this darkening cloud, it’s that we are becoming more aware of where our energy comes from, who ‘owns’ it, who stands to benefit. We’re thinking more urgently - even if just because it’s hitting our pockets - about renewables.

And certainly in our house we’re thinking twice now about taking a bath, we’ve turned every thermostat down and we’re switching every light off that we don’t need on. For those of us who can hopefully just about afford it, it is a pain but it reminds us, too, there is a genuine cost to our indulgent living that affects poorer people, the climate, vulnerable species - the whole of what I’d call God’s good Creation; and it cuts us off from the spiritual rhythms of a simpler life.

But for so many people who are about to be plunged into the terrible dilemma of heating or eating - and that phrase still sounds outrageous - it’s a matter of survival, and this is now an urgent moral moment: for politicians, to whom, to be fair, we outsource so much of the soul-searching; and for those of us who might feel powerless, but still have the power, at least, to help someone else worse off.

Jesus said, ‘What you do for the least of these, you do for me,’ and that’s one cost, today, that might be worth considering.

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