LATE August is one of the year’s great hinges. The children are off school. Temperatures are usually balmy. But darkness falls earlier, and parts of the landscape are already donning their winter clothes: many arable fields have already been stripped bare by huge mobile agricultural machines that take up more than half the width of the twisting A-roads of this part of Wiltshire.
For now, it’s still the season of busy farmers, beer gardens, and family Facebook snaps from the Med. By month’s end, Christmas will be closer to us than Easter, and the days will be rapidly shortening.
The longer nights have compensations. August’s night sky is perhaps the finest of the year. The Milky Way is at its best, and the annual Perseids meteor shower rewards patience and persistence with some glorious sights — and a few decent photos. Even at night, outside temperatures are mostly pleasant.
One midnight, I drive 20 minutes to the Avebury Stone Circle to try to photograph shooting stars above the megaliths. In almost pitch black, it takes about ten minutes to set the camera correctly, but then it can be pre-set to take a succession of 13-second exposures, secure on its tripod, primed to catch a meteor’s trail.
As I wait, I lie on the grass on my back and gaze at the densest part of the Milky Way, framed by the “summer triangle” of very bright stars: Vega, Deneb, and Altair. The light from stars takes years to reach us. When I look at Altair, I see light generated when I was 30 years old and thought that I wanted to be a politician; the light from Deneb has been travelling since Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed King Solomon’s Temple.
Awe-inspiring thoughts; but why I should be awestruck by the beauty of the scene, even before contemplating the extraordinary realities of an ordinary night sky? Why should I be interested in the stars, let alone be moved by their appearance? The human instincts for beauty and for awe are why I never found the atheistic account of our nature convincing, despite living in what is proving to be a long, cold winter for Christian faith in this country.
Even here, in the villages of deepest England, the numerical collapse of the Church of England is as dizzying as the vastness of space. I look at my parishes’ registers from even the 1990s with amazement.
Late winter is another of the year’s great hinges. New life starts emerging in the coldest weeks of the year. Are the few adult baptisms, the few returns to church after a long absence, in recent months here spiritual snowdrops, or an artefact of random chance? Even the stars don’t know — yet.
The Revd Gerry Lynch is Rector of the Wellsprings Benefice in the diocese of Salisbury.
Angela Tilby is away.