Five years after the restrictions on movement provoked the beginning of recorded worship online, there is still a weekly service of communion from the Anglican Church in Menorca, Santa Margarita with a sermon preached from somewhere in Menorca that is hopefully relevant.

Days of Light, or Lighten Up!

The following article was originally published in the Spring 2025 issue of Roqueta, Menorca's English-language magazine.

During March, we accumulate about an extra three minutes of daylight every day. The pace starts to slow during April, but there’s noticeably more light, week by week. I wonder how many of us start to feel that the light around us releases a sort of inner lightness of the soul at this time of year. Perhaps the ambivalent meanings of ‘lightness’ combine, so that both diminishing of darkness, and relief of the weightiness of life converge. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera writes: ‘When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose.’ This double-meaning of lightness is really quite convenient when thinking about the way in which lengthening daylight helps us to feel as though we carry less of a weight with us and within us.

We are living in times where life can often feel dark, not only in seasonal terms, but in threatening and fearful aspects of our world. There are those who recognise this, and rather than simply turning off the news, which amounts to trying to turn off darkness, are endeavouring to offer something lighter (in both senses of the word): good news as a counterbalance to all the troubling news. A retired doctor from Sant Lluís has a WhatsApp group to which he sends occasional articles with encouraging news about environmental and climate developments. The BBC sends a weekly e-mail called ‘The Upbeat’ to convey good news. These are efforts to shine light into darkness.

So despite the very mild nature of Menorca’s winter, the daylight makes a difference, and perhaps liberates us. If there is a kind of tension between the seasons - contraction in autumn and winter, as opposed to the expansion of spring and summer - then there is a similar tension - and release - within us. Do the darker days tend to make us more timid, whereas the lighter days make us feel more like living out loud? Do warmer days make us feel more like lingering outside? Are we less likely to ‘play it safe’ during the darker months, and then less averse to taking risks during longer days? Do those of us from northern climes retain the tendency to make ourselves small and contained during darker times, while letting loose our full splendour as it becomes lighter around us? Sometimes we need inducements to be our most expansive selves, an invitation to open up.

Menorca itself can play a role in opening us up to be a more fulfilled and fulfilling version of ourselves; to allow daylight to lighten the burden of self-imposed restrictions on ourselves. It might be the Mediterranean light, or the more relaxed way of life, but I have met a number of people in Menorca who have found themselves liberated to explore their own personality, their goals and aspirations, the boundaries of their inhibitions - in short, fuller versions of themselves. Light not only makes plants grow, but can encourage human growth, too! Various literary and creative works have illustrated this. For example, in Wintering, Katherine May has written a reflective and poetic book about moving through life's darker periods, when a sudden illness in her family plunged her into a time of uncertainty, seclusion and darkness, from which she emerged into light, both literally and figuratively, mirroring the changing seasons. In the film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray’s character moves from darkness (selfishness and stagnation) to enlightenment (selflessness and renewal), echoing the lengthening of days as he gains wisdom.

The thing about the gradual increase in lightness is that we don’t have to do anything to make it happen - in fact, there is nothing we can do to change the cycle of increasing and decreasing light and dark (apart from moving to Menorca from northern Europe, of course!). It just happens. There is a spiritual analogy to this, which in religious terms we refer to as ‘grace,’ which is the presence of divine love in the world, freely offered and readily available, and yet which not everyone accepts as openly as we might. Why is this?

Desmond Tutu, in his book In God’s Hands, gives a clue, writing: ‘If we have been brought up in an environment that values achievement at any cost, over and above the worth of simply being human, we find it extremely difficult to be comfortable with the ethos of grace - of sheer gift. …I accept that it must be enormously difficult to be open to receiving when one seems to lack for nothing, and that is perhaps why so many who come from affluent societies do not easily understand the wonder of grace, freely bestowed by a deeply generous God.’ In other words, our relative affluence obscures our ability to see the true light, in rather the same way that urban street lighting masks the celestial wonder of a dark, starlit sky.

Many people have noted that it is now five years since the pandemic caused various forms of lockdown all over the world. In some ways, it was a dark time, especially for parents shut in an apartment with two or three children, unable to escape the confines of their walls, quite possibly finding it rather claustrophobic. But it wasn’t all darkness. Although in many ways life has returned to a sort of pre-pandemic normal, for most of us lives have been changed, not least with increased awareness of many aspects of life that might easily be overlooked, especially our interdependence.

Before the pandemic, I know that I said on several occasions that the church cannot be just a social club for like-minded individuals (not that finding like-minded people is always easy!). But we did discover, when we were unable to gather in our churches, that there is a value to be attached to social interaction, even though it might not be the primary function of churches. It has made us more aware of those for whom social isolation is a permanent challenge, not just something produced during a temporary lockdown. So the five years since the pandemic began have in fact shone a light into some rather obscure and shady parts of life.

As we move through the increasing brightness of spring, we are reminded that Easter itself is the ultimate triumph of light over darkness, of hope over despair. Just as the lengthening days lift our spirits and encourage growth, the resurrection of Christ offers a deeper, spiritual light - one that breaks through the heaviest burdens and offers the grace of renewal. Easter is not just an event but an ongoing invitation to step into that light, to embrace the freedom it brings, and to live more fully in the joy of divine grace. Perhaps, like the changing seasons, we are called to open ourselves to this transformation, allowing the light of spring and Easter to illuminate not only our surroundings but also our souls.