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The hills of South India drop steeply towards the Indian Ocean. From the high rocks where the ibex find safe foothold you can see the waves that continually wash up in vast quantities two kinds of magnetic sand, monazite and ilmenite. Monazite is composed largely of thorium (the name looks back to the Scandinavian Thor) and is used in making incandescent gas mantles. It glistens, but is of a dull color. The pure thorium oxide is extracted from ilmenite and is used as the finest pigment in white paint and enamel. Ilmenite is black. The valuable sand is separated from the other sand (which looks far more valuable, for it often seems all garnet and crystal and jacinth) first by magnet, and finally by vibrating tables down which it is run, and where the magnetic impurities are separated out by gravity.
The process of water-grinding in the sea (by which the particles of ore are detached from the original rock), friction of grain upon grain in the rough and tumble of the waves, the influence of a force which we name and use but cannot explain, the tedious, tiny agitations of the vibrating cables, which call into effective co-operation the mighty pull of the earth—all these processes work together to bring forth from a black sand whiteness, and from a dull-colored sand a substance which helps towards illumination.
And the first of these is the breaking up of the rock in the bed of the sea; the discipline of renunciation. It is a figure of the true. First the severance: that which is death to the old order of being, then many a blow that we call blinding, little unexplained constraints, tedious minutes of shifting circumstance—that out of mere dust of earth something good may be prepared for the use of Him whom we call master and Lord.
And all this is part of the preparation for the spiritual climb.
It is true that “for a man never to feel trouble, nor suffer heaviness in body nor in soul, is not the state of this world, but the state of everlasting quiet,” and yet it is possible to cast all our care on our Lord or we should not be told to do so. And sometimes the cares are so many and so heavy that if we did not cast them we could not bear up at all. The one way, then, is the old way—“Casting all your care upon Him; for He careth for you.
He who asks us to do this knew what it was to be taunted about a burden. In that old book of close-packed riches, William Kay’s Psalms with Notes, the opening phrase of Psalm 22:8 is translated “Roll it on the Lord.” The notes state: “The mockers taunt the Sufferer with a phrase He had been in the habit of using. He has at last, they mean, an opportunity of testing His maxim.” There may be some faint shadow of this which He endured appointed for us. We may be with those who do not understand. If so it will draw us closer to our Lord, who was not understood.
And now, Roll the burden of cares of thy life’s way upon the Lord. Cause it to go, the Hebrew says; a push will do it. Cast thy care, hurl it—so the word is there. Hurl it with a forceful act of will: it is not enough to think of doing it. Do it. The three verbs seem to be chosen to bring home to us that this committal is a definite act. We do not glide into it. (We never do glide into any act of faith.) And the marginal reading which Young adopts, “Cast on Jehovah that which He hath given thee,” carries us further still. The burden has not come of itself. It is a gift, a trust. If we deal with it as we are told we may, we shall find rest unto our souls.
In his note on our Lord’s word about the illness of Lazarus, Westcott opens a very heaven of joy: “This sickness is not unto death (as its issue and end) but for—to serve and to advance—the glory of God, in order that the Son of God may be glorified thereby. In every other place in St. John the preposition used here marks the notion of ‘sacrifice in behalf of’; and this idea lies under the narrative here. There was some mysterious sense in which the sick man suffered in behalf of God’s glory, and was not merely a passive instrument.”
These words touch more than illness of the body. If only we allow them to sink deep into our being, if only we refuse forbidding feelings and believe that even to us this grace is given, we shall indeed find rest.
In that rest we shall climb. The unrestful cannot climb. They are too busy adjusting and readjusting their burdens to have breath or strength to spare for such ascents.