1 Death and the Lighthouses (1 January 2001)

stones of death. Across the street, there remained a church and its
graveyard, of which the park, before the building of the road which divided
them, must have been a part. As the natural light faded, he wande red
among the stones, waiting for the fear to grip him. But he felt no fear.
Darkness surrounded him and his senses grew alert. He could hear the
wind through the branches, and listened carefully for the groaning of those
buried beneath his feet. He was angry with Matthew and his preaching.
Matthew’s god. He sat with Matthew in St Giles and knew there was no
supernatural presence in there. People prayed to brick. Death was death.
He found a long stone, a tomb, engraved with a stranger’s name, and laid
down on it. He felt blasphemous and it gave him pleasure. The blackness
seemed to deepen. He waited for some kind of punishment. When nothing
happened, he stood up, loosened his flies, and pissed happily on the grave.
*
Painful and unexpected events in our lives are like the concentric rings
made by throwing a heavy stone into a still lake. The event is the stone,
which soon sinks, and isn’t important in itself. At first the rings are wild,
close together, easy to see: in the same way, after disaster our emotions are
wild, friends can see the immediate damage. Later the rings spread out, are
less easy to see, and the further they spread, the calmer seems the water. In
the course of our lives, several stones are thrown (by whom) into the calm
of our existence. These stones are gathering on the bed of the lake (so
perhaps they do have importance in themselves) — cold, hard, unbreakable
— because if one day we sink down into our own suffering, drown in our
pain, the stones, the disasters and disappointments that have marked our
lives, will be waiting for us. What company they will make when we are old!
And the rings, the effects of pain, do they really spread out and disappear
Are they not always there, somewhere And what if somebody pollutes the
lake with poisonous waste Can we ever find purity again And what if the
lake is drained, leaving a plain of barren clay Even from childhood, has the
lake already started to drain
*
When Matthew married Elizabeth she came with a teenage son from a
previous marriage. The father had disappeared when Johnathon was five, in
strange circumstances. To all intents the match between Matt and Liz was
an arranged one, carefully coordinated by the church community to which
they both belonged. The decision for Matt to legally adopt John was also the
work of the ecclesia, who with subtlety and discretion convinced the happy
couple of the advantages and, in their view, the necessity of adoption.
1 (1 January 2001) 6