A Sunday reflection
I have been worshipping regularly at St James's Whitehaven for about as long as we have lived in the town, which will be fifteen years this year, but this morning at the 8am service my attention was drawn for the first time, perhaps by a trick of the light, to one particular stained glass window near where I usually sit, and I looked at it properly for the first time.
The bottom part of the window clearly represents the waves of the sea, and a pair of arms are reaching up from the waves to grasp a rope which is clearly a bell-pull.
The rope ascends to a church bell which is superimposed on the sun, whose rays descend back to the earth: but the wheels which swing the bell and the rays of the sun are depicted in a way which also makes them look like the wheels for the lift pulleys at the top of a mine shaft, and the struts of a tower supporting those wheels, of the kind which can still be seen at the top of the Haig Mining Museum where Haig Pit was once in operation and which are still a prominent landmark in the town of Whitehaven.
The two main industries with which Whitehaven was once associated were mining and seafaring. Both once exacted a heavy toll in human life and suffering.
It is right that we remember this.
The bottom part of the window clearly represents the waves of the sea, and a pair of arms are reaching up from the waves to grasp a rope which is clearly a bell-pull.
The rope ascends to a church bell which is superimposed on the sun, whose rays descend back to the earth: but the wheels which swing the bell and the rays of the sun are depicted in a way which also makes them look like the wheels for the lift pulleys at the top of a mine shaft, and the struts of a tower supporting those wheels, of the kind which can still be seen at the top of the Haig Mining Museum where Haig Pit was once in operation and which are still a prominent landmark in the town of Whitehaven.
The two main industries with which Whitehaven was once associated were mining and seafaring. Both once exacted a heavy toll in human life and suffering.
It is right that we remember this.
Comments