"And there was no longer any sea..."

      “I hate soap and water!” it was my first line as an amateur actor, playing the part of a street urchin in the school production of Oliver. The line was delivered with such intensity of feeling that decades later, people are still talking about it (well, almost). I wasn’t acting and I haven’t changed. Soap is OK. Water, I still hate.

  I have seen what water can do. So when the Northside Bridge in Workington was swept away in the early hours of Friday morning taking with it PC Bill Barker, whose 45^th birthday it would have been on Saturday, I know what caused it – a force as unstoppable as an express train with an impact just as deadly.  In Thirumullai Vasal, a village you will not have heard of it because the old village simply isn’t there any more after it was swept away by the Asian tsunami, I saw the rubble where a few weeks earlier the bridge and houses had once stood. Only the concrete petrol station remained. It was like those old photos of Hiroshima; the rubble came only to my knees. As far as the eye could see everything had been flattened – nothing had survived the water’s onslaught.

  When the tsunami wave had long since subsided, our charity team from Grimsby Institute – a fishing town linked by the sea with those villages on the Indian coast – were ushered into a darkened room in Vellore to see the Christian Hospital’s film footage of what the water did. We came out twenty minutes later in silence. When we edited the film into something that could be shown on TV here, we had to omit some of the more horrific scenes. The British censors would never have allowed the pictures. Water. It is that ambivalent force that gives life and takes it away.  In Orkney, where I worked as a community minister and hospital chaplain, the fishermen deliberately never learn how to swim. Drowning is the easier option; death from hypothermia is slower but just as inevitable in the icy waters of Scapa Flow. I remember returning from one sea search for a missing diver shivering just from the water saturating my ministerial suit…and then hearing that the diver’s body had been found a few days later in Arbroath, more than a hundred miles south. That’s water for you.

  My Session Clerk on Hoy launched the TGB, on 17 March 1969 at Longhope, the RNLI lifeboat that sent eight of his colleagues to their death in one of Britain’s worst lifeboat tragedies. Sent to assist the Liberian-registered Irene, the TGB was capsized by a 100-foot wave. Most of the men in the Kirkpatrick family were wiped out. Oh yes, I hate water.

   No wonder that if you want a symbol for Christian dying to the old life and awakening to a new life, you choose water. Baptism is tame, of course, water that is house-trained, contained, safe – but the symbolism is there: a death-giving, life-giving force that takes no prisoners. Ask Noah. Ask Jonah. Little wonder too that no-one in the Bible likes water either.

 Faced by such a force, you do not stand a chance. I don’t suppose PC Bill Barker stood a chance; but he stood there nevertheless on a bridge that a few seconds later would be atomised, saving the lives of those about to cross in the early morning darkness. I am reminded of the heroic face of the New York fireman captured on camera as he ran up the stairs of the Twin Towers to certain death on 9/11. There are no words to describe such heroic deeds; perhaps instinct takes over. As at the Twin Towers, we should be in awe of such elemental forces – fire, water. But the greatest, most unstoppable, force is love.

  I would not like to be the Christian minister consoling Bill Barker’s widow and four children at his funeral. What to say? Perhaps I would choose to quote this vision of heaven from John’s Revelation: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.” St John hated water too.

 This week my thoughts and prayers are with Bill Barker’s children. I know the graves of the Kirkpatrick men who had given their lives, sacrificed them to the water, in that fateful lifeboat rescue of 1969. A whole family wiped out – the father and uncles of little Kevin Kirkpatrick. I had the privilege of meeting Kevin Kirkpatrick thirty years later. A big man in every sense, hewn from granite, the same shock of red hair I remember from the photos of him at the funerals. He has his own boat now: the Longhope lifeboat. For Kevin Kirkpatrick, inevitably, is the coxswain. “It was what I had to do” he said to me modestly. Water, it seems, brings out the best in people.