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Good morning. Yesterday at 3.59 pm at Greenwich Royal Observatory the tilt of the earth in the Northern Hemisphere reached its greatest distance from the sun. This was the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year. From today every day will be a few seconds longer and lighter. We won’t notice it much at first but spring will come. At our latitude the solstice coincides with the lead up to Christmas. Since the 8th century the Western Church has marked these days by a set of refrains sung at Vespers – that’s Evening Prayer if you’re an Anglican. These refrains are called the ‘O’ Antiphons because they address Christ in imagery drawn from the Hebrew Bible, each beginning with ‘O’. So, O Wisdom, O Leader of Israel, O Root of Jesse, O Key of David. You’ll know them if you know the hymn O Come, O Come Emmanuel. Yesterday’s Antiphon was O Morning Star, or, as one contemporary composer puts it O radiant dawn. A cry for light on the darkest day. The antiphons are sung to what I find a fiendishly difficult plainsong chant that weaves up and down seeking resolution, yearning, shot through with longing, and starting with this single syllable. O. Oh is often an exclamation, the involuntary intake of breath at sudden news good or bad. It can be surprise, grief, delight. ‘Oh’ suggests that something has broken in from beyond ourselves which requires us to attend. It reminds me of the Hindu sacred syllable aum, which helps to centre the self in meditation. Oh, is what human beings say, a universal recognition that we do not invent our own reality, that we are intractably a part of one another and of nature and of a cosmos which is often dark and puzzling. And yet ‘O’. Please, something give, something yield. This year the O antiphons have really spoken to me in the fear and uncertainty of our second pandemic Christmas. ‘O Morning Star, splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness, come and enlighten those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death’. We are still under that shadow, but ‘Oh’….light. And today’s antiphon is a cry for the world. ‘O King of the nations and their desire, the cornerstone, making both one. Come and save the human race which you fashioned from clay’. We cannot save ourselves but we can respond to the unity we are. The head of the World Health organisation told us yesterday that if we could only get on with vaccinating the world the pandemic would soon be over. And yet, Oh. Oh. The light is already shining in these dark days. But are we prepared to see it?