Novemberish

The past day or two have not been heart-warming meteorologically speaking.  November has been in full swing with wind and rain and rain and rain and grey cloud and rain.  The adjectives for November say it all really.  T S Eliot called it sombre November; Robbie Burns wrote of chill November; for Ruskin it is dark; Thomas More labelled it sullen: Walter Scott calls it drear.

Once upon a time, one November day, an event of apparently little relevance happened at Lower Samsell, a place that few people had heard of then and scarcely a soul now either.  That November day was especially drear, dark or whatever other miserable adjective you can think of for one man.  He had been taking a Christian meeting in a farmhouse.  These, however, were times when the government prescribed how each person was to worship and this meeting did not fit the frame.  And so that November Sunday the speaker was arrested and incarcerated in the County gaol.

The gaol, understandably, offered few preaching opportunities.  He might have expected some clemency from the local Justice but his retort whenever asked about whether he had learned his lesson was, "If you release me today, I will preach tomorrow".  So of course he wasn’t released and it was, to all intents and purposes, 12 years that he was inside.

But you and I would never have heard of him if it were not for that dark November day.  For in that gaol, the silenced preacher discovered another ability entirely.  Honing that ability over the long enclosed years eventually gave birth to a book which from that time 450 years ago has never been out of print.  For in that gaol in Bedford, the prisoner preacher John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress.  

In his great story, Bunyan’s pilgrim also enters a Novemberish place.  It is called the Valley of the Shadow of Death and the pilgrim is warned by two other men to turn back at its threshold.  But the pilgrim says, this is my way to the desired haven, and launches, sword in hand, into the Valley.  He cannot see its end but he knows that the dark, dreary place is the path to a flowering destiny.  He emerges eventually, and singing,

   

Dangers in darkness, devils, hell, and sin,

Did compass me, while I this vale was in;

Yea, snares, and pits, and traps, and nets did lie

My path about, that worthless, silly I

Might have been catch’d, entangled, and cast down;

But since I live, let Jesus wear the crown."