Ice

We awoke this morning to a world covered in ice - freezing rain and a sprinkling of snow had fallen during the night.
The cue for something suitably Northern:
Sibelius' hauntingly beautiful 'Luonnotar' a setting of the Finnish creation myth in the Kalevala




And a secular piece of writing which (with its echoes for us of G.K. Chesterton) sums up much of our present predicament in a culture, secular and ecclesial,  dominated by 'unscrupulous optimists':

"The 'we' attitude, by contrast, is circumspect. It sees human decisions as situated, constrained by place, time and continuity, by custom, faith and law. It urges us not to throw ourselves always into the swim of things, but to stand aside and reflect. It emphasises constraints and boundaries, and reminds us of human imperfection and of the fragility of real communities. Its decisions take account of other people and other times.In its deliberations the dead and the living and the unborn have an equal voice with the living. And its attitude to those who say 'press on' and 'ever onward' is 'sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof'. It does not endorse a comprehensive pessimism, but only the occasional dose of pessimism, with which to temper hopes that otherwise might ruin us. It is the voice of wisdom in a world of noise. And for that very reason, no one hears it."
Roger Scruton: The Uses of Pessimism'  

And to confirm us in our pessimism about the future, another calamitous decision by a culturally subservient judiciary intent on dismantling the traditions which have formed us - see here from Cranmer