The title of this blog was inspired by an Elder in St Paul’s who was brought up on the Isle of Harris. Angus had an uncle who when he was particularly moved by the preaching on the Lord’s Day used to say: ‘Aye the minister was a long time in the quarry last night.’
I loved that image of the man in his study chipping away at the Scriptures to bring forward a Word for his people. Even more so when I discovered that I am descended from at least three generations of slate quarriers on Easdale Island. There was a time when Easdale slate was exported to Scandinavia, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia. Mary Withall has written a book entitled: Easdale, Belnahua, Luing & Seil: The Islands that Roofed The World. That is really no exaggeration.
I have a chisel on the wall of my study which was found in one of the now redundant Easdale quarries. I call it my Grandfather's Chisel and although there is a degree of poetic license in that it is a reminder to me of my heritage. It is a reminder, also, of the nature of my work.
The American poet Archibald MacLeish once spoke of the process whereby he produced a poem:
'I chip away like a stonemason who has got it into his head that there is a pigeon in that block of marble. But there's a delight in the chipping. At least there's a delight when your hunch that the pigeon in there is stronger than you are carries you along.'
That's not unlike bringing a sermon to life. You come to the work in the faith that there is something in that passage or text that is stronger than you and once you have connected with that Word it carries you along to that moment when you deliver it to God's people.
So when I am getting ready for the Lord’s Day I am ‘in the quarry’.
But according to Joni Eareckson I have been in the quarry in another sense. I wrote about this in yesterday’s blog. In a conference talk she made reference to 1 Kings 6: 7 and how the stones for Solomon’s Temple were ‘dressed’ in a quarry: ‘. . . no hammer, chisel or any other iron tool was heard at the temple site while it was being used.‘ Joni took the quarry to be our present experience where we sometimes have to endure the hammer and the chisel in order to be worthy of the peace of the Kingdom. The times of battering and chipping away although heartbreaking can be the very ones that shape us and mould us according to the pattern of Jesus’ life.
Joni would say I have been in the quarry in that sense over the last year. There is a sense in which Covid-19 has placed us all in the quarry. Part of our response as Christians must surely be that quarry time is not wasted time and that God is working in our lives to draw us closer to Him and establish us more firmly in His ways. George Macleod wrote this prayer:
‘O Christ, the Master Carpenter,
who at the last through wood and nails purchased our whole salvation;
wield well your tools in the workshop of your world,
so that we who come rough-hewn to your work bench may here be fashioned to a truer beauty of your hand.’
