He giveth, and taketh away

An interesting co-incidence, if you'l excuse the word, of the events in Chile in the last week and today's New International Revised Alternative Lectionary reading.

And around the county, even in as parts as far away and odd as Pepperstock and Farndish - places where the light of civilisation has barely dawned - people will be preaching on the power of prayer - on the way in which it was God's work that brought the miners up from the depths, and that in similar circumstances - should the "Doily shed 17" get locked in again, for example - our best hope of divine intervention is to pray likewise.

And I'll go with the prayer bit - for surely if you're trapped half a mile underground you're going to pray for anything that gets you out.  Ideally a divine act will have you out in a jiffy, but failing that a series of small divine interventions over the period of a few months will do, albeit it might be less comfortable.

For if God is the kind of fairy godfather that pulls us up out of the pits - surely he could prevent us being in the pits at the wrong time in the first instance? Even if for good reasons of physical geography and seismology, with a dash of gravitational physics, the mine is going to collapse - surely he could arrange for the miners to be out on strike at the time? But apparently on this one, that's not how it's going to work. For there are no copper and gold mines in France, where it would be easier to ensure that the miners were all out on the picket lines when the earth moved.

Or if it was the work of the Dark One to dump the miners down there, and God's work was to defeat him and bring the miners out - then why didn't he get in there three months earlier to stop it happening?

There is a phrase that says, "In him we live, and move, and have our being". Which would imply that both the mine's collapse and the rescue were part of the Divine plan. No need for the suspension of physics here, as physics exist within his plan, and not as some kind of unfortunate barrier like a fence of barbed wire, where God has to stretch the wires apart occasionally to let people get out of fields where herds of bullocks are threatening to tread on their toes - as happened to Marston and Burton when they went for their "Oneness with nature" walk last week.

So we give thanks for the miners' resurrection, and we shudder at the awesome power of this terrifying universe. Aslan was not a tame lion, and this is not a safe universe, and the story of the Fall has more truth in it than we imagine. The fields produce nettles and thistles, and while we probe the bowels of the earth there is always the chance that the roof will fall in - and the miners in China were not so blessed.  This time we will not  have all the men returned - but we still pray for those that are left, and for the ones that mourn. It won't make sense, but sometimes it's all we have.