The Gathering Gloom

On Saturday, there was just time for a quick circuit of the reservoir, towards the end of the afternoon; I would have left it until later, but my wife doesn’t like walking in the gathering gloom. 

However, I do: I find that the fading light brings new interest to old, familiar scenes. Lights come on in the distance, in places that seemed lifeless in broad daylight. If the sky is clear, moonlight recreates the landscape. If there is no moon, you can usually make out the path by the ambient light from nearby towns and villages. If your night vision is not good, I suppose you could carry a small Maglite, or wear one of those fashionable LED head torches favoured by runners - even when they’re only jogging down a well-lit city street - but to me, they’re just a distraction.

Other senses are sharpened. The wind rustling through the dried grasses by the side of the path, the water lapping at the reservoir’s edge, the cries of wildfowl in the distance: all can be heard more clearly. In the twilight, you walk with care, attentive to the terrain beneath your feet. Perhaps it’s only my imagination, but the wind from over the moor seems strangely evocative of acid soil, peat bog, reeds, cotton-grass, and silt-heavy rivulets.

For me, it’s a good time to combine recreation and contemplation. I can put on the Walkman: songs, sermons, and stories come into sharp focus in the isolation of the out-of-doors. 

I have an abiding memory of walking the woodland paths of a local park in late November, as the shadows lengthened, until I could see no more than a few yards in front of me. I was listening to one of Lovecraft’s classics. By the time I’d got to “Six Shots By Moonlight”, the external world had become the perfect complement to that of the imagination, and - and was that a movement? A shape - a figure - a face? There? Behind that bush? No, of course not - but, then, again… “Ooer!” as they used to say in comics. Nothing like the gathering gloom to breathe new life into “Herbert West-Reanimator”.

That said, I wouldn’t recommend striking out across country, along previously untrodden ways, when the night is really dark. I remember a disastrous expedition somewhere in The Forest Of Trawden, hopelessly lost for a couple of hours, knowing that there were walls, barbed wire and steep drops nearby - but entirely unable to make out just where they were. It was not a happy experience.

I know you’re ahead of me, but, as we were reminded at Salem on Sunday, this is a time of gathering gloom, spiritually speaking. In times like these, only the foolish and the feckless - aided and abetted by many determined deceivers - will follow anything but tried and tested paths, no matter how novel, interesting, exciting and supposedly “Spirit-led” the “new ways” (i.e. old heresies with new hats on) may seem. 

As the writer of Proverbs reminds us: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” (Proverbs 14.12.) R. C. Sproul comments: “In OT Wisdom Literature, life is not mere existence but a way characterised by true relationships that conform to God’s design. Death is not only the end of physical life but an irreversible descent into the disorder of moral perversity (cf Proverbs 5.23, where “dies” is parallel with “led astray”).

And that takes us, as you might have guessed, to Jeremiah 6.16: “Thus says the LORD: ‘Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.’”

Here is John Gill, commenting on the above. It’s worth reading through a couple of times, I’d say. In the gathering gloom, we need to walk with care, attentive to the terrain beneath our feet.

Ask for the old paths; of righteousness and holiness, which Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and others, walked in, and follow them; and the way of salvation by Christ, which, though called a new way, Hebrews 10.20, yet is not newly found out, for it was contrived in eternity; nor newly revealed, for it was made known to Adam and Eve immediately after the fall; nor newly made use of, for all the Old Testament saints were saved by the same grace of Christ, and justified by his righteousness, and their sins pardoned through his blood, and expiated by his sacrifice, as New Testament saints; only of late, or in these last days, it has been more clearly made known; otherwise there is but one way of salvation; there never was any other, nor never will be; inquire therefore for this old path, which all true believers have trodden in.