Erosion

This is Canada’s Water Week, culminating on World Water Day, March 22.

But today - one of the powerful effects of water on landscape and the human soul - erosion.

Erosion is part of the natural order. It can be devastating like a tsunami, but it can also produce magnificent scenery like the beautiful Garden of the Gods in Colorado, the Grand Canyon and the famous White Cliffs of Dover.

Erosion and the chemical process of dissolution that carves out cave systems all over the world, are signs of the universal law of attrition. Nature wears things down. Nature and time gnaw away at us – ‘erosion’ has the same Latin root as ‘rodent’. Whether gradually or ferociously, everything moves from order to disorder.

But everything in the human heart resists that law. In Job 14, Job says, “as a mountain erodes and crumbles ... as water wears away stone and torrents wash away the soil, so you destroy a person's hope."   Ultimately we have nowhere to stand!  Job is not just lamenting the law of natural attrition. He protests against it!

Like the mountains, we are creatures of time, but we are not granite. We feel pain in a way that mountains don’t. We are creatures of hope, but we don’t stand a chance against the onslaught of time. As Peterson puts it, “you relentlessly grind down our hope”. Job writhes against this futility, despair and the hopelessness of hope.

E. J. Pratt was one of Newfoundland’s best-known poets. Much of his poetry examines humanity's struggle with nature. As the son of a Methodist minister, he sometimes accompanied his father as he delivered tragic news to a surviving family member.

On one occasion he recalled seeing the change on a woman’s face as she heard that her husband’s ship had gone down - “the pallor and the furrow on her face as the desolating news sank in”.

His poem “Erosion” bears witness to the power of the sea on the land and the faces of those who experience its power.

It took the sea a thousand years,
A thousand years to trace
The granite features of this cliff,
In crag and scarp and base.

It took the sea an hour one night,
An hour of storm to place
The sculpture of these granite seams
Upon a woman's face.

Talk about the fearful wonder of water! Tragedy truly de-faces our humanity. We are all of us weather-beaten. I think Job would have resonated with Pratt’s poem.

Yet in the fullness of time, God did something to reverse the soul-eroding, life-destroying process that tears us down. In Jesus, God came to live among us,

to bear our tragedy with us and to restore our dignity.

The powerful flow of Jesus’ life erodes and tears away all kinds of evil from our hearts and leaves unique beautiful formations on the landscape of our lives. Ultimately Jesus transforms erosion into new creation!

Talk-back:
Does this image of erosion resonate with you? How?
Where do you see beauty flowing from the hard things in life or from the creative hand of God?

Photo Credits: All courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Grand Canyon by chensiyuan  ... Dover ...  Garden of the Gods  by Corbyrobert... Old Woman – by Hamed Saber