Ministerial Meandering

Things are not all they seem.

Denman Island is a jewel in the Georgia Strait.  Thanks to one of the ladies in my a cappella singing group (The Cheam Mountain Singers), Sheila and I stayed in her house there this past week.

We woke to the barking of sea lions and the call of herring gulls, as opposed to the rattle and hooting of trains, and the blare of Harley-Davidson motorbikes along the highway.  It was blissful.

Our walks took us along shingled beaches with endless interesting crustacea washed up by the tides, some of whose shells were clearly still inhabited by their original owners.

As always, on BC shorelines, there were piles of driftwood, sculpted by wind, water, and weather into smooth tusks, or complex fantastic shapes that would do well for imaginary monsters by firelight.

In daylight, out to sea, amongst the flotilla of gulls on the water, large, black, upright branches morphed into seal flippers, with splash and dive giving away the illusion.

One morning, along another shoreline, the sun threw up a bizarre shadow like a mooring post, but rather close inland.  With the sun behind it, all we had was a dark shadow to squint at, and I came to the conclusion that it was just a rather oddly shaped fishing buoy that must have lost its mooring and drifted close to shore, and gave the impression of a head and shoulders.

“Don’t worry”, I said to Sheila, “it’s not alive.”

Whereupon the aforesaid fishing buoy rose slowly from the surface of the sea, and became a very largely apportioned female swimmer - indeed attached to her own personal floatation buoy, attached by a stout string to her waist - who then proceeded to wade ashore, creating her own tsunami and sending a small flight of surprised oyster-catchers into the air with cries of alarm.

This Kraken from the deep was a charming lady who told us that she swam every day of the year - although to be fair, there was very little evidence of actual movement for the minutes we stood debating the provenance of this aquatic vision.    It was more a case of immobile immersion. 

She told us that even when the outside air temperature had been at -11C, the water temperature had been +8C.  I ventured to inform her that I was a tropical animal, and any attempt to get me into water less than +20C would be met with fierce resistance.  Although I may be carrying the extra pound around my middle these days, I was positively skeletonic alongside this splendid Leviathan.

At which point we parted company as she happily crashed off through the driftwood and littoral pines, sending bald eagles skywards from their lofty nests as the earth trembled beneath her.

Why, then - at that moment - should I think of two things; carbon and Jesus?

Perhaps because wood is made largely of carbon more than anything else, and carbon - given the right circumstances, of sufficient heat and pressure - can form diamonds.

And perhaps, because of the convoluted way that my mind works sometimes, I thought of Jesus as ‘just a man’ - like a piece of ordinary driftwood - not obviously different from the rest of us shoreline wash-ups; but subjected to the appropriate heat and pressure, became a diamond among us. 

That same man who rode a donkey into Jerusalem, two thousand-odd years ago, under the pressure of the sin of the world, turned to diamond on the cross, and caused the centurion to say, “Truly, this man was the Son of God!”

Philip+