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Yesterday, I went for a walk in the park. A melted snowman built at the weekend, had become a small pool of ice. But the button eyes and the twig that had been its smile were still in place somehow. So I picked up the stick and I have it in my pocket. To anyone else it’s a twig. Ordinary, unremarkable, like millions of others in the park. But to me now it’s the smile of a snowman. I’ve found myself holding onto it like a relic, like a medieval Christian holds onto a piece of the true cross. While a mixture of bewilderment and devastation stalks these pandemic days, I carry a symbol that connects me to a deeper truth about human life: that other unknown Londoners – there were many such snowmen -were, it seems, determined to be creative together in the middle of so much distress. It’s been hard to take in what the Archbishops called yesterday the ‘enormity’ of the number dead from covid. Beyond 100,000 now. Every number has a name. Every life mysterious, precious, and as Christians would say, made in the image of God. Everyone. Statistics and data are crucially important in a crisis dependent on science to get us through. But our soulful selves find meaning not so much in the data but between the cracks of the numbers, in stories and signs: where grows enough faith and strength to be able to face the reality of living and the inevitability of dying, and still say that God is with us even when it’s hard to see how. Psychologists will tell us that it’s absolutely normal for people going through trauma to experience utterly contradictory things all at the same time. We feel both fury at and sympathy with decision makers; frustration with and gratitude for law enforcement. We feel a disorientating mixture of sadness, guilt and relief, grief and comfort; we feel energised and exhausted; all at the same time in the course of one day, in the course of one hour of one day. I am asked as a Christian to recognise daily life as fundamentally Christ-like; a human life haunted by grief and shot through with miracles. And at a time of such destruction to search for signs of creativity…. even in the fallen branch of a tree in a park that connects me with the people who imagined it as something else entirely. In itself a sign of resilience, faith, solidarity and hope.