It’s the first of the year, the temps are dropping and evenings lengthening by the minute. On January 4, the mornings start growing longer, too—or so my Swiss brother-in-law, born on the 4th, tells me. We move toward light.

Two weeks ago, I went out at daybreak to get the paper and heard a rush of bird song. Or rather, a triple-word, triple-syllable trill by a bird I eventually spotted in the top branches of the mock orange beside our garage. Small, brown, wrenlike, with a brilliant song. What gives, I thought, when even birds are making merry in this shortest, darkest month of the year?

In another 30 days, bird song will be rampant and we’ll have gained an hour of daylight. We move toward grace.

Last week in Switzerland, I discovered the Protestant church in the town of Martigny in the heart of Catholic Valais, with its 17 stained-glass windows designed between 2011 and 2013 by the Swiss artist Hans Erni. Erni was 102 when he began the project and 104 when he completed it. A non-believer, he turned Biblical stories into charged, nearly secular images whose searing colors and often whimsical imagery struck me as profoundly sacred, inasmuch as they sanctify the everyday. Consider Eve as a farmer’s wife harvesting apples by the basketful, Jonah as a diver plunging head-first into the sea as he reaches out with one hand to play with a fish, Isaiah as a young boy charmed by the guileless snake at his knees.

Consider, above all, the faith of a painter who in his second century of life took on this massive commission. The Protestant church at Martigny is lit from the inside at night, so that residents of the town, believers and non-believers both, cannot avoid the bright vision of this spirited centenarian.

Erni died in 2015, at 106. May his optimism inspire ours.