Overwhelmed by hope

Yesterday I heard a remarkable story. Well, I'd heard it before, as have most of the world of course. But it's different when you meet the man himself, isn't it? When he tells his story. And when he shakes your hand and blesses you.

José Henriquez

Alfredo Cooper with José on the far right, Bishop Henry Scriven behind 

Last night, in St John the Baptist Church, Grove, one of the 33 Chilean miners who were trapped and rescued last year, José Henriquez and his wife Blanca, interpreted by Alf Cooper (evangelical chaplain to the President of Chile), told the story of the explosion, how the miners survived and how they were rescued. Here's the moment when José and Blanca were reunited: The rescue on TV. It was incredibly moving to have the two of them there, in front of us, very  much alive and saying, "Don't give up hope and don't give up praying." I particularly remember Blanca describing how she and her daughter first heard of the accident. At first, the radio gave the name of the wrong mine, and she thought, "Well, that's not where José's working." But later it was corrected and they realised it was Copiapó. Instead of staying glued to the radio, they turned it off and knelt down and prayed. And continued for the duration - as did the miners in their underground tomb, twice a day, for 69 days, all together.

José and Alf were interviewed on Radio 4's Sunday programme, which gives some idea of a little of what we heard (26 minutes, 10 seconds in):
Radio interview with José . Last night he was quite undemonstrative and struck me as someone who was very much at peace. He was utterly sure that the miners' rescue had been a miracle, as the exploratory drill which eventually found them hit a rock and was diverted into the chamber where they were.

His over-all message was that God is alive and real, that He hears and answers prayer, and that He is loving and good - which means His answers will be for our good. At the end he and Alf Cooper prayed for the whole audience. It was a privileged evening, I must say. Next week, the two of them are speakers at President Obama's presidential prayer breakfast in Washington! For all that and all the media attention, he struck me as a genuinely humble guy who simply wants to share the goodness of God

José and Alf praying for their audience

José Henriquez

I've spent long enough contemplating the end of life for a bit. So here's the opposite: our local newspaper's running a story about one of the Chilean miners who came back 'from death'.

A CHILEAN miner who was trapped underground will speak in Grove next Tuesday about his ordeal.

It will be the first of three talks in the county at the start of a UK tour by 55-year-old José Henriquez, and he will be staying in Abingdon next week.

The miners were the centre of world attention when trapped 700 metres underground for two months last year.

Mike Burke, a spokesman for the Church Mission Society in Oxford, said Mr Henriquez, the 24th of 33 miners to be rescued, would also give two talks in Oxford.

Accompanying drill operator Mr Henriquez, and acting as translator, will be Alf Cooper, chaplain to the President of Chile, who led the nation in prayers during the miners’ ordeal.

Mr Burke said: “When the rescue was taking place, one billion people worldwide watched on TV. José is a pastor but he also has to work as a miner to support his family.

“During his time in Oxfordshire, José will be based with a family in Abingdon.

“There is a tremendous amount of interest in this tour and some of the destinations around the UK include mining communities.

“The three talks in Oxfordshire are now fully booked.”

Mr Henriquez will address about 300 people at Grove parish church — Mr Cooper has close links with members of the congregation — next Tuesday, at 7.30pm.

Mr Burke added: “To put things into context, after this tour José is planning to attend a prayer breakfast with American President Barack Obama.”

Jane and I are going (DV) to hear him on Tuesday with a good friend of ours from Oxford. I'm expecting to be inspired.

It's good to talk

I really don’t know what to write about. Should it be more about the Chilean miners? Or about our celebration here for Jane’s big birthday? Or should I just vent my frustration over BT’s seeming inability to restore our internet connection, after more than a week?

Let’s get the negative out of the way first. On Friday 8th our telephone suddenly stopped working. Jane did all the checks that British Telecom say, otherwise they threaten to charge you if the problem turns out to be to do with your equipment. (Do you remember the days of service?) Then we rang them to let them know, using a mobile of course. The usual rigmarole of pressing numbers on your key-pad. After several attempts we worked out the route to talk to someone. Well, said a lady from India, you should have be on again in two days…. Saturday came and went, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday came. “She probably meant two working days,” said Jane sagely. Sure enough, the phone rang, and a man perceptively commented, “It seems you’re back on line now, and I won’t need to come out.”  Presumably he was not in India.

However, when I went to turn on my computer, there was no broadband. It seemed they’d restored the one and cut off the other. So Jane rang up the helpline again. Did the same checks. No joy. “We’ll ring you back in twenty minutes,” said a lady from India. A few hours later, we thought we’d better try again. This time a man from India came up with some different suggestions, with the same result. “We’d better send out an engineer to you. The earliest we can do is…Monday next week.”  Were they sending him from India? I wondered. Jane, to give her due, did protest that we’d had the problem a long time now, and they seemed to have caused it. But that was the best they could do, they said. Never mind that the internet is my main means of communication. So we had to wait and meantime pick up emails at the admirable Cornerstone.

On Monday afternoon having waited in from 1 o’clock the BT Open Reach van duly arrived at 4.45ish. Judging from his outer London accent he obviously hadn’t just arrived from Bangalore. How nice to deal with a person face to face! Jane discussed the situation with him. He did the same checks and more – and confirmed that the problem appeared to be at the exchange. He’d go round at once and try to check what the problem was, if he could get in. We asked him whether the call centre was in India. Yes. Minutes later he rang to say he’d not been able to get access but was activating the job for the next morning (Tuesday). Apparently all calls go via India, including the engineers’, and apparently they all get stacked in a queue. Tuesday morning came – along with a phone call from India. “Were we back on line?” “No.” “Try unplugging the router and plugging it back in.” No change. “Well, we’ll be working on it.” All day we waited for the green light to come back on, and then gave up and went to Cornerstone for coffee and emails. A message was waiting for us on our return. Someone would be coming out again to do something undecipherable within the next 24 hours. They would phone to let us know. At the time of writing we’ve heard nothing. I’m generally regarded as a patient man…! (Oh yippee! They’ll send an engineer… Guess when! On Saturday….)

So it was a good thing we had the distraction of Jane’s BIG BIRTHDAY. How considerate of her mum, I thought, to have the forethought all those years ago to ensure it fell on a Friday! Which meant that we could celebrate all weekend. Which is what we did. The family descended en masse and created a banquet on Saturday. Jane was surprisingly unfazed when, after an expedition to the rec and Cornerstone with her grandchildren and parents, 

The star of the show

Enter the Duchess

she walked into a houseful of family and friends. She’d been canny enough to follow the principle of ‘Ask no questions; told no lies’. However the new bicycle, aptly called the Duchess, did take her by surprise, thanks to the complicity of our next door neighbours, Rob and Jane.

To be honest, it probably helped not having internet for the weekend, as there was no temptation to subside behind facebook in the evening. Or even to write my blog! We could just concentrate on enjoying each others’ company.

On Monday night I watched the Panorama programme about the San José mine rescue, and reflected what a minuscule inconvenience it was being without internet for a matter of days. There were the miners for seventeen days entirely cut off from the world, knowing nothing, not even whether anyone was looking for them, nor whether they’d ever survive to see their families again, nor whether they’d retain their sanity…. I wasn’t sure whether the programme was the start of a media debunking of euphoria about the rescue, as we were promised revelations about safety failures. It particularly concentrated on the stress on one miner and his partner – and I think in the event did a good job of showing a bit of the deep psychological impact those 69 days had and will go on having. It ended with shots of him running (as he had down the mine) on the beach with his brother.

Besides the introduction when Jeremy Vine had used the word ‘miracle’, there was no mention of the miners’ faith, in contrast to the interview with Alf Cooper on the Radio 5 Live Drive Programme last Wednesday by a distinctly sceptical Peter Allen. However that is well worth listening to: http://www.cms-uk.org/Portals/2/mp3/Alf-Cooper-mine-interview.mp3 The Rev Alfredo Cooper, as he’s rather charmingly called, recounts the wave of prayer that went on and, most strikingly, the 34 in the mine (when we all know 33 miners were rescued). The miners say Jesus was there with them. One can understand a BBC interviewer having difficulty with that! Like King Nebuchadnezzar peering into the fiery furnace! “Did we not cast three bound into the fire?…. But I see four men unbound… and they are not hurt; and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods” (Daniel 3.24,25). The miners certainly emerged into the light of day looking remarkably fit and well, thanks to good nutrition and clean clothes – and, I tend to think, the best possible Company. Maybe, when there’s no light, in the depth of human predicament, you see most clearly, if you’re prepared to open the eyes of faith.

Buried by good news

Some people contacted Radio 5 Live today, I gather, complaining about the extent of the news coverage of the Chilean mine rescue. “It’s not as if England have won the World Cup.” Who on earth, I wondered, could be so put out that their bit of news was being eclipsed? What an extraordinary complaint! 33 trapped miners struggling for survival for 69 days being brought from death to life – a modern miracle indeed. I suppose some football freaks might consider England winning a miracle too, but actually that is only a game. This is life.

The launch of the Resistance Campaign – do you remember? – 3^rd June this year. It’s a coalition of Disabled groups who were campaigning against any possible legalisation of physician assisted suicide. You probably don’t, because it was buried by the Cumbrian shootings. I regretted at the time that the Resistance Campaign failed to hit the headlines, but such is the nature of the news media.

However this story, Operation San Lorenzo, is of mythic proportions, of even greater magnitude than Apollo 13. 33 men buried half a mile beneath a mountain for 17 days without any communication with the outside, waiting, for all they knew, for a lingering and inevitable death. The cavern where they were trapped they called Hell (“This hell is killing me”). The camp above in the Atacama Desert, where the rescuers and the miners’ families were, was called ‘L’Esperanza’ – Hope. The capsule was called The Phoenix. All the imagery is full of potency: from imprisonment to freedom, from darkness to light, from death to life, from hell to heaven, rebirth, resurrection, miracle…. I was puzzling with Jane about how they were located by the probes in this huge 130-year old mine. Subsequently I heard the President’s chaplain, Alfred Cooper, describing the prayer meeting that was called when news of the disaster broke, and then how the eighth probe was deflected off a rock into the space where the miners were trapped.

“The first miracle, you believe?” asked Matt Frei, the BBC anchorman. The chaplain (who, incidentally, has links with our local parish church) was in no doubt that there were numerous miracles as well as enormous resources of engineering and scientific skill. It was remarkable that the night of 12^th/13^th was completely clear at San José, whereas apparently almost always it is smothered in cloud, “a pea-souper”. It meant that the helicopter taking the men to hospital was able to fly freely. As one of the miners, Mario Sepulveda, said, “I’ve been with God, and I’ve been with the devil. They fought – and God won…I grabbed God’s hand. I never doubted that He would bring me out.”

The consistent message of the miners was that they always had faith (whether in God or not) and they were determined not to give up. When the rescue capsule reached them, they sang about the One who loved them. They talked about the struggle, about fighting to live. And of course the families were praying in “Hope”. And the world watched – and it was good news. My first ever blog entry was about the determination of the triathlete, Jessica Harrison, who trained relentlessly – and for me was an example of not giving up. Well, this, the longest ever mine ‘disaster’ to be survived is an even more powerful. inspiration never to give up. The baby born to one of the miners a few weeks ago says it all – she’s named Esperanza. Hope. Above all, thirty-three men are alive. Thank God – you really should.