At the far end of the beach at Banff, in Scotland, a small river finally reaches its destination. I walked here today and stood for a while enjoying the mid-afternoon light, the blue skies, the sound of waves as the tide turned, and the almost inaudible murmuring of the river as it emerged from the grass and met the cobbled slope, where it rushed towards the sea.
It's a favourite beach, but this part of the walk is less familiar. "All rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they will return." (Ecclesiastes 1.7) I've often pondered these words, in the way you do when well written words don't immediately give up all of their meaning. Like many other sentences in Ecclesiastes, there are hidden depths in this image, suggesting constant motion, journey's culmination, and the cycle of rain, river and sea.
I stood for a few minutes gazing and listening, half thinking and half praying, the scene so obviously recollecting words that are meant to induce pondering and wondering. I knew why I had paused. The words of Ecclesiastes are an exact fit to the lovely serenity in front of me. It might be worth explaining why they came back to me so powerfully.
The first sentence of Eccl. 1.7 was used by Elie Wiesel as the titles of his two volume autobiography, in my view one of the most important literary accounts of the Holocaust. Volume One of his memoir he titled All Rivers Run to the Sea, and Volume Two, And the Sea is Never Full. Wiesel survived Auschwitz and for the rest of his life he determined to tell the stories of those who perished there, and to bear witness through these stories and his own story to the truth, the reality, the factual inescapability of the Shoah.
As a Nobel Prize winning novelist, an essayist and journalist, Wiesel like Jeremiah the prophet, wrote to inform, to declare, to bear witness, to ensure that the truth would never be silenced, or forgotten, or denied. Two days ago in our different ways we marked Holocaust Memorial Day and yesterday I was reading about Elie Wiesel. And while standing by that lovely stream flowing out of the marsh into the sea, the words of Qoheleth came naturally to mind, towing with them memories of reading Wiesel's autobiography.
It was 1997. I was on holiday in Yorkshire National Park, near Goathland, in a lovely 19th C railway cottage beside the railway where every day a steam train passed. I was sitting under a tree, in a deck chair, beside the stream at the bottom of the garden, reading All Rivers Run to the Sea. The story had just reached the point where the chugging of the steam trains arriving at Auschwitz, and the screaming of the whistles, signalled arrival, with all the horror and terror that lay ahead.
And at that precise moment, in that eerie way that defies our most insistent common-sense, the Yorkshire steam train came under the bridge with a huge puff of white smoke and a loud whistle. I'm not sure I have ever fully recovered from that near numinous sense of fear and heightened awareness, as the world of 50 years earlier coincided with my immediate mental images of the book I was reading. What I do know is this; I can't read (or recall) that verse of the Bible without remembering that Tuesday afternoon, in July 1997, sitting beside a stream, reading under a tree, when Elie Wiesel's testimony was accompanied by sound effects choreographed by I'm not sure what - or whom.
"All rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full." The writer of Ecclesiastes was too good a philosopher-preacher to indulge in frivolity for its own sake. And Elie Wiesel was too serious in his calling as survivor, storyteller and witness, and too burdened by memory of what happened to his people, to choose his book titles carelessly.
He doesn't explain his choice. As one who stood in that liminal space reserved for those whose life experiences make faith in God at times all but impossible, he stood in defiant trust; and as one for whom at other times faith was at least real enough to have an argument with a God in whose world Auschwitz happened, he stood his ground before God, albeit with his shoes off.
For myself, I defer to a man whose humanity, was so deeply wounded and permanently formed by unimaginable suffering, both witnessed and experienced. Today's lovely walk, in a world beautiful and far removed from all the brokenness elsewhere, I was ambushed by a scene of a river and the sea, and by a memory of a book I once read, under a tree, beside a stream, alongside a railway.
"All rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they will return."
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