September Sands

We often used to go to Cornwall in September when we were young marrieds, and we had two holidays down there in our retirement years, when Col took these photos of the beach at Praa Sands.  It is the iconic beach of my 1950s childhood.  We pronounced it Pray Sands back then by the way, pronunciation seems to vary now,  It remains the ideal beach to me - no hotels, no funfair, no cafe, no shops of any kind, just a vast swathe of empty sand with a wilderness of fascinating rock pools at one end. They were full of red anemones. Still are, I noted on our last visit.  Which will be my last visit, this side of Armageddon.

Of course these days, I do need teashops - and loos - disabled toilets in gloomy fact.  And yet, just yesterday, I was a young married.  

This poem seems to capture the glory, and the sadness, of that childhood beach.

The Waves

John Betjeman (1906-1984), "Beside the Seaside," ad fin.:

And all the time the waves, the waves, the waves
Chase, intersect and flatten on the sand
As they have done for centuries, as they will
For centuries to come, when not a soul
Is left to picnic on the blazing rocks,
When England is not England, when mankind
Has blown himself to pieces. Still the sea,
Consolingly disastrous, will return
While the strange starfish, hugely magnified,
Waits in the jewelled basin of a pool.

https://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-waves.html 

That I guess is the Evolutionary/Darwin/Dawkins view of life.  That all this beauty is really for nothing, all futile.  Or as one poet, Wilfred Owen I think, put it: "Oh what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep at all". 

The Bible view is so different. It tells us that, far from evolving, we are in a continuing fall from a perfect state. And it promises us that the whole earth will become what it was always means to be, a paradise of peace and beauty on which we can live forever.

John Betjeman saw the beauty and did it justice in his poems, even if he did not know of the paradise earth to come.  And I hope when the time comes God will wake both poets from the dreamless sleep of death and they will see this lovely lovely earth again. And then, to kind of paraphrase Dickens ending to Great Expectations, there will be no prospect of a further parting from it. Death will be "no more".

I am slowly getting back into my routines - back to the field service, and back to the Kingdom Hall for all meetings.  Driving and parking are still "terrors in the way" though. I even have an invite to two coffee morning later in the month with some of my congregation siblings. I wonder if we can persuade Jacks to come round for coffee...