Isaiah 51: 1-6 (links validated 7/15/23)

My late father-in-law was a geology lecturer. I think it would be fair to say that his life revolved around rocks. Clearing his house after his death last Christmas has shown us that, if we didn’t know it already. We’ve come across box after box of carefully labelled rock samples, gathered on working trips, but also on family holidays. Coming back from the seaside with rock is nothing unusual, but it’s usually the sort that’s made of peppermint candy, with the resort name running through the middle of it. Not for the Le Bas family – they came back with the real thing, packed in the car around the luggage. To us, as we wondered what to do with all those rock samples, one looked much like another, but to Philip’s father each one was unique, coming from somewhere specific, with its own story to tell. “Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug”, says Isaiah to the people of Israel...

My old friend Mark got sober in 1981. By 1982, he was now a former pastor and managing a drug store. I was single and the pastor of the mission congregation he had served. We would go out to the local truck stop about 10 p.m. and drink coffee and talk for hours. Neither of us had anyone to go home to. In those days, my brother Norman was dying of alcoholism and didn’t know it. He never got help but kept on breathing until 1992. Mark and I would talk about how Mark got sober. After the immediate craving was gone, Mark described a time of great inner peace. He was going to meetings regularly. He called it living on a pink cloud. He felt physically and spiritually good for the first time in his life. Of course, that didn’t last. Life is difficult...

When, in 1952, Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote his short story “Der Tunnel” (“The Tunnel”), he created a surrealistic classic. The protagonist of the story is a 24-year-old student who boards his usual train for his university, but finds that when the train enters a very small tunnel, the tunnel does not end. The darkness continues for 10, 15, 20 minutes. The student gets nervous, but the other passengers are calm, because they don’t see (or don’t want to see) the imminent catastrophe. The student finds the train conductor, and questions him about what is going on with the train. The conductor is evasive at first, but eventually leads the student to the locomotive, which is empty.

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