THE year is turning, thank goodness, and I feel some warmth in the patches of sunlight that dapple Sadler’s Wood. Snowdrops, crocuses, and even some hesitant early daffodils are drawn to into those patches of light and warmth. The days are lengthening as we make our pilgrimage into Lent — and indeed Lencten, from which we take the word Lent, was simply the early English word for spring, the time when the days lengthen.

For poets and preachers, the parallels between Lent as the turning of the year towards spring, and Lent as the season for turning and returning to God, were manifold and in every sense fruitful. Lancelot Andrewes summed them up in an Ash Wednesday sermon in 1619: “So ‘it hath seemed good to the Holy Ghost’ and to her [the Church] to order there shall be a solemn set return once in the year at least. And reason; for once a year all things turn. . . The earth and all her plants after a dead winter, return to the first and best season of the year. The creatures, the fowls of the air, the swallow and the turtle, and the crane and the stork, ‘know their seasons,’ and make their just return at this time every year. Everything now turning, that we also would make it our time to turn to God in.”

There is some comfort in feeling the links between our inner turns and returns to God and the movement of the outer seasons, a sense that things might be on our side — that dawn after darkness and spring after winter might mean something more than themselves, might be prophetic emblems. We need such hope in a time when so much in our social and political life seems obstinately dark and frozen.

A few years ago, I was commissioned by Virginia Theological Seminary to write a series of five sonnets for its bicentenary celebrations. Part of its story involved a journey from its community’s complicity with slavery, through awareness and repentance, towards solidarity, reparation, and reconciliation: a journey that was itself from a kind of cold and darkness towards warmth and light.

Some of those five sonnets made very specific references to that history; but, when it came to the sonnet for Lent, which drew on Andrewes’s sermon, I wanted to make it more universal, and, rereading that sonnet now, I find that it applies as much to me, and to my own Church and nation, as to my American friends:

Lent

That we might come at last to his true light
We turn again to him, when all things turn;
The year returns to growth and spring. Our sight
Is blessed with tender green. We learn
To hold the gospel plough, to follow him
And not look back. Our Lenten discipline
Opens deep furrows in the frozen soul
And sheers through the obstruction of our sin,
Harrows our hearts and opens us to him,
Till Christ the Sower finds in us good soil.
Seeds of his kingdom deep in our dark clay
Will stir with hidden growth through Holy Lent,
Will share with him Good Friday’s dark descent
And rise to life with him on Easter Day.