Lent 5 - Risky Chemicals

 As Rach is rather busy, (I'm sure she'll explain all next week) this week you get a guest blog from me - Emma

As a chemical engineer, quite a lot of my day job has a fair bit to do with chemicals.  Shocking, I know.  In writing this week’s blog post, I started to think about one chemical in particular.  Bear with me.  Can you guess what it is?  It’s a non-metal which is pretty abundant, solid at room temperature and is commonly yellow.  It’s known as brimstone in the Bible.  That’s right, it’s sulphur (the last clue clinched it, right?).

Sulphur, although really useful for things like matches (and, actually, living) is pretty nasty stuff.  This is why gases are cleaned of sulphur before they leave a refinery – so that the sulphur can’t escape as SO₂ and contribute to greenhouse gases. This means that, through a clever reaction known as the Claus process, the sulphurous gas is heated, the liquid sulphur “condensed” out and the sulphur-free gas allowed to continue.  The sulphur is massed into a stockpile and then shipped around the world.  The liquid sulphur has to be kept hot (i.e. above 150°C) in the pipe so that it doesn’t solidify, and block said pipe.  Once the sulphur has solidified, that’s it.  “He has walled up my way so I cannot pass”, says this week’s Bible link from Job 19:8.  There’s no going back – you’re going to need a new bit of pipe.  To help with this, and to prevent the build-up of any cooling sulphur, the pipes need to be straight.  They may not have bends, even to go around something.  While normal industrial structures look like this:

Image from http://infiniteprose.wordpress.com/ - one of Burtnysky’s refineries

these sulphur lines, instead of bends, have mini-junctions, like this:

My own sketch

This is so that the pipes can be “rodded” – basically, a massive rod is shoved down the pipe to push all of the sulphur out of the other end.   That’s nice, Emma, I hear you say.  But what does that have to do with Rach’s Lent Blog?

I’ll tell you.  This week’s picture is of a remarkable sculpture by Jonathan Clarke.  It can be found in Ely Cathedral.  

Looking at it, it occurred to me that the journey this sculpture represents is a far cry from that that I see in my every day life – none of the regimented planning that comes with being an engineer.  The path meanders across the wall – sometimes in shadow (the verse from Job continues “... and he has set darkness upon my paths”), sometimes in light, sometimes seeming to bask in the coloured light from the stained glass window (side note: also probably dyed using a sulphur compound...).  It lacks the directness to which I have begun to be accustomed, but I guess the point is that our journeys of faith are never really as simple and straightforward as we’d imagine them to be.

The journey also isn’t always quite as we’d imagined.  Maybe sometimes we think we’ve got somewhere with God, and y’know, we’re doing ok.  Quite happy with how much of my life God takes up, I mooch along, feeling all right.  Then... bam!  You realise you’ve got it all out of proportion.  Look at the actual size of this sculpture:

Image from http://www.jonathanclarke.co.uk/commission/waylife.html

It’s huge!  Much bigger than anything I imagined when I saw the original image.  My feeling is that much of the time, this is also what my faith journey is like.

Something that I really like about this piece of art is the cross at the end of the path.  To me, it has a somewhat higgledy-piggedy look about it.  The arms don’t line up, and looks very much like something that I’d produce if I tried to make a cross at home by myself.  I think it is that “home-made” look that I like – the imperfect, humble and relatable quality.  But is the cross the end, or the beginning?  Is the focus of the sculpture the time of Lent, culminating in the death of Christ, or the journey onwards from the cross, through the door – the path which we are all now travelling? 

Lord God, through life’s difficult path,

be with us on our journey

and lead us from darkness to the light of Christ.

Amen.