R is for RAILWAY

It's my favourite form of travel. You just sort of sit there and watch the world go whizzing by, a world that you don't usually get to see. A world of green fields, rivers, bridges, back streets, back gardens and impatient traffic, all stopped to let the train through. A world you have often viewed from another place but now that you're here, it looks so different, not what you imagined at all. Everyone stops for the train and the train stops for no one. And underneath is the constant rhythm of metal wheels on metal track. Sometimes darkness pervades the whole scene and then a shaft of light up ahead brings you back into the world. Other times, the train passing seems to be just too close for comfort and every carriage is a blur until the noise fades quickly and then you are on your own again, travelling smoothly, gliding along.

My first ever railway journey was in the early sixties when the whole of our Sunday School and an equally large number of parents and those guilty by association went on the annual expedition to Bangor, though it was better known as the Sunday School Excursion. The railway station, strangely, was not in a town or even a village but out in the country and known by the rather romantic title of Trew and Moy. Situated beside the local creamery, it was about four miles from Moy and equidistant from Dungannon, the major town in the vicinity. It lay on the Trewmount Road if I'm not forsaken but the first problem almost everybody had was to find transport to the station, so while train travel was accessible to all, the station wasn't! Sadly, like many of the little country stations that existed forty or fifty years ago, it couldn't cope with the speed of the automobile development and by the middle of 1965 it was long gone. Nowadays, it's the yard for a haulage firm but the quaint buildings still exist and remind me of a time when everyone stood on the platform in the country air and waited for the puff of smoke coming around the corner from Dungannon.

Probably the most famous railway disaster in Ireland happened outside Armagh. It signalled the beginning of the death knell of railways in the city and by the time dad had rented some land on the outskirts of the area, all that was left was the odd railway sleeper, the walls of a roofless stone bridge and the high banks on both sides of where the 'road' had been carved through using the straightest line ahead as the plan. Dad had several fields lying right alongside where the railway had been and many days, when he went to work there or even to just check his cattle, I would disappear for a while up onto the old railway and imagine that I was transported back in time to an era when the carriages rolled and the smoke bellowed from an engine as it made its way to Newry. It was always amazing how far you could see down the track ahead and how solitary a place a railway track can be when the trains no longer travel. In some areas it is still possible to see where the trains ran but in so many others, the now trackless route has made way for new buildings and roads and a piece of our history has gone for ever, except in the minds of those who knew it well.

We still travel by train occasionally whether it be in our own country or abroad and I still get the same buzz from looking out at places I know well yet because I see them from a different perspective, they become a whole new experience and it's just like seeing them for the first time. And yet I look around me and there are carriage loads of commuters who don't even see the window let alone the view and spend the whole journey engrossed in a book, a laptop or an ipod. Truly, familiarity breeds apathy!

That makes me take a serious look at my own spiritual life, especially when I see the enthusiasm evident in some of our young Christians and those less far down the track. Am I so engrossed with 'life' that I have forgotten the view of a God dying on the cross for me? Have I sung the words so often that Psalm 23 has just become a repetition? Do I say 'God bless you' in the same way as I utter 'thank you'? Am I immune to a world on my doorstep that needs an injection of God? Is being a Christian so comfortable that it never challenges me to look beyond my own existence? What is my perspective on life and more importantly, what is God's perspective on my life? Jesus says, 'Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.' I won't do that while my head is stuck in the sand of self centredness. I think I need to check the view again and get on the right track.