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Still Quarrying - Ten Thousand Places

Fergus Buchanan April 23, 2025 2 2
Still Quarrying - Ten Thousand Places

I have a thing about kingfishers. Kingfisher curtains in my wee study, kingfisher prints on the wall, kingfisher ornaments. I try not to analyse it too much, but the shape, the colours, the flight, it all seems to come together to make a deep impression on me. Not to mention that this is another gift from God emerging out of His Creation.  

Yet, in all my seventy years I have only actually seen one kingfisher in flight! I was walking on the bank of the Forth and Clyde canal with Gabrielle and one flashed across the surface of the water, brightening up an otherwise overcast morning.  Just one sight of a favourite living creature but the impact has remained with me and, please God, will remain with me forever.

Gerard Manley Hopkins touches on this in his poem: ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire . . .’ The things we hear, touch and see have the power to touch us in the depths because they all come from God. Those great lines:

‘For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.’  

So, it’s not surprising that even a brief glimpse of something beautiful can stay with you forever. This is Christ playing out in ten thousand places! Even more so when the Word who was there in the beginning speaks clearly to you and draws you close to His heart, perhaps for the first time. Or perhaps with a word of assurance when life is hard and challenging to faith. Or when He strikes you with a truth hitherto not completely understood.

In the long run of things these are moments, drops in time, but in Christ  they are eternal.  ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ and touch the heart of one man forever so, as the apostle Peter would say, the Word is a seed eternally planted.

 

Fergus Buchanan