'The cuntre of schadewe of deth': the dark days before Advent

We are in the dark days before Advent. The darkness, the cold, the quiet landscape on the cusp of Winter, with the only liturgical marker being the Stir-up collect: this gives particular character to these days, days when we wait in cold and darkness for Advent. We might even think of it as an ecclesiastical 'microseason', to use a term beautifully explored in Nature's Calendar: The British year in 72 Seasons (2023). Indeed, the book identifies a late November microseason which falls around Stir-up, entitling it 'Even the Light Grows Cold', saying of this microseason:

As November unfurls the light lowers, casting long shadows. This is the moment in the year when the bronze and golden leaf fall comes to its end, and in these conditions our eyes recalibrate ... Our colour vision shifts in late November, when the axis of the earth has shifted so that the sun's rays reach us at oblique angles and the colours of deciduous foliage have first transmuted and then disappeared altogether.

It is deeply fitting that our eyesight recalibrates in this week of Stir-up, in the midst of the darkness of Winter's approach, a sign suggestive of our souls looking for the light of Advent.

When I stopped at The Middle Church in Jeremy Taylor country at 8am on Stir-up Sunday (pictured), the sun had not yet risen. The church stood against a gloomy dawn sky, the leafless trees signalling Winter's arrival. I reached for Wycliffe's deeply resonant rendering of the Prophet's words:

The puple that yede in derknessis ... whanne men dwelliden in the cuntre of schadewe of deth.

Such are these days before Advent, days when cold darkness begins to envelop us, when frosts settle, when the sun rises after 8am and sets at 4pm: "the cuntre of schadewe of deth". They are a sign of our deepest need in heart, mind, and soul for the advent of the Lord. And so they prepare us for the Advent hope, readying us to behold the light of the Advent procession, to pray the great collect of the season with its petition "that we may cast away the works of darkness", to sing with yearning Veni, veni, Emmanuel.

This 'microseason' of the dark days before Advent is to be cherished, for it is in the cold and darkness of these days - the sign of us "dwelliden in the cuntre of schadewe of deth" - that we are turned in heart, mind, and soul towards the Lord's advent, days when we might pray Cranmer's deeply resonant collect:

Lord, we beseche thee, geve eare to our prayers, and by thy gracious visitacion lighten the darkenes of our hearte, by our Lorde Jesus Christe.

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