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  • Added August 28th, 2014
  • Filed under 'All Sorts'
  • Viewed 1789 times

Sand

By Colin Gibson in All Sorts

reflections on the metaphors of sand and the spirit

SAND
When I was a little boy, after I had had spent the day at the beach digging channels in the sand, building sandcastles and watching the incoming tide sweep it all away, I was put into a bath, and when I was lifted out to be dried, to my astonishment there at the bottom of the bath lay a multitude of tiny grains, shifting about in the swirling water. That was sand.
When I was much older I climbed down an enormous wind-driven sandhill to reach a remote Otago beach. There I watched the waves thundering onto the shore and noticed the deep footprints I left behind me washing away in the swirl of the water. I pretended not to see two lovers hiding in the dunes; I spent a long time gazing at a yellow-eyed penguin standing on a sandy ledge, waiting for its mate to come waddling ashore. That is sand.
Siosifa has reminded us that sand means much more than rock does to Pacific island peoples. We harvest iron sands and oil-rich sands, and on the West Coast they sift the sand looking for gold nuggets. When floods rage we pile up protective banks of sand-filled bags.. Nobody can count the number of grains of sand on the face of the earth and on the floor of the sea. Sand, that precious particle, that wonderful element of our world.
Most of us are first aware of sand on the edge of the sea or the margin of a lake because it is there that the grinding down of rock by the wash of water or wind takes place. Sand creates for us a world of delight, but for other creatures it is a nurturing place, a home: a nesting or resting place for penguins, seals and sea lions, for crabs and shellfish. And it is a place where stories cluster, for Jesus himself often walked there. On sandy places legend and real life meet and mingle.
Sand is ground-down rock and minerals, often made up of hard grains of quartz, glittering with silica. Under a hot sun it is burning, waterless, trackless; a place where winds and sandstorms obliterate footsteps and dessicate plants. At this very moment thousands are thirsting and dying on the pitiless sands of the desert. Inland, sand becomes desert or wilderness, where the shifting dunes and bone-dry wadis create a huge barrier to any movement: a world of hardship, loneliness and desperation. There Jesus was tested by dreams of power; there later generations of Christian hermits tried to escape from the world and all its temptations. And the whole Hebrew nation was forged in the desert, as the tribes escaping from slavery in Egypt struggled across the empty Sinai deserts towards Canaan.
Grains of sand dribble easily through the fingers; sand is hard to hold. On the seashore the wash of the tide fills any marks we may have left, overwhelms our sandcastles, threatens to break through the defences of sand dunes, piles and rock walls. How natural that we should think of time itself as dribbling through our fingers, or even more pointedly slipping away, grain by grain, through the narrow neck of a sandglass. Our fear of our own mortality is symbolized by sand.
In his poem Ozymandias (did you learn it off by heart at school?) the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley pictures an ancient colossal sculpture, now shattered and almost buried in the desert sands as an image of human pride brought low by the passage of time. Its inscription, 'Look on my works, you mighty, and despair,' was meant to terrorize the tyrant's people; now it serves to remind us all that all human power is temporary, a brief moment in the vast deserts of what we call history.
Robinson Crusoe was horrified to discover the imprint of a human foot on the sandy beach of his desert island. But he was to find that the presence of another human being was not necessarily a threat to his own existence. Man Friday became a pupil, a friend, an ally. Sand, whether it's desert or shore, can be a place of human community, even of totally unexpected revelation and revival. In the desert, Moses met his God in a burning bush; in the desert a starving horde of migrants found a food they could only think of as miraculous. They called it manna: we know it as mushrooms. But most important of all for the Christian story of which we are part, a group of despondent disciples went back to fishing one morning and found both a catch exceeding all they could have hoped for, and the man they thought dead standing on the beach, preparing a hot breakfast of fish cooked over a driftwood fire.
No area of sand is limitless: there are boundaries where we move beyond the edge of the sand into another kind of world. At the close of this service we will reenter the secular world of the everyday; we will leave the coast and journey on to the rim of the sky and the sea. But beneath the sea on which we sail will stretch continuously the sandy bottom of the ocean, and the Christ who stood on the shore welcoming his disciples to share food with him will be there to greet us.
Colin Gibson