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Good morning. Two days into the New Year and I wonder how many of us woke up to the second day of a new exercise regime, a new habit of mindfulness, a new determination to eat only what is good for us and rather less of it. This desire to purge ourselves at the start of a new year seems quite elemental. Yesterday as the gales howled round the seafront here in Portsmouth I was reminded of the haunting chorus from T.S Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: ‘Clear the air, clean the sky, wash the wind, take stone from stone and wash them’.

Yet there are few signs of regeneration at the start of 2025. Economic growth remains elusive, war rages on in Ukraine, the Middle East and Sudan and there’s the suspected terrorist attack in New Orleans. We are a quarter of the way through this century and the Millennial optimism of twenty-five years ago has not borne much fruit. We are five years on from Covid and many of us are still traumatised: children who missed out on socialisation and school, young men and women now too anxious to work. All of us have memories of that bleak, disturbing time which we would perhaps like to edit or erase. The urge to purify ourselves runs deep, whether as diet or cold water swimming or getting up an hour earlier. It is a spiritual instinct and not to be dismissed.

The 45th Psalm depicts the world at its most turbulent. Nature rages, wars grind on. Yet God is still present in it all: ‘Though the waters rage and swell, though the earth be moved and though the hills be carried into the midst of the sea, God is in the midst of her, therefore shall she not be moved’. And the Psalm goes on, ‘He makes wars to cease in all the world: he breaks the bow and snaps the spear in sunder’.

This is not bland optimism, but hope. It speaks to us of those times when we can only grit our teeth and struggle on. ‘Be still then, and know that I am God’, says the psalm. The urge to start again, to purify our appetites and desires surely comes from an intuition that there is an unlimited resource at the heart of things, that the universe is not indifferent to us, that strength will be provided if only we ask. Through yesterday’s gales the first snowdrops appeared. Between the 2nd and the 6th of January, the feast of Epiphany, the wise men are on their way towards the manger. We carry our traumas with us, but we are not defeated.

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