Christian Viewpoint: Shackleton saw providence as awesome, majestic and glorious – and he was half right
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“It seemed to me often that we were four, not three.”
The Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton has been in the news, writes JOHN DEMPSTER. It’s the centenary of his death in 1922 and a search is under way to locate the wreck of his ship, Endurance, at the bottom of the Weddell Sea.
Shackleton and his crew were forced to abandon the vessel, and their expedition to the South Pole when Endurance was crushed in an ice pack in November 1915.
He was determined to save all of the 28-strong team, which included a stowaway. “I pray God I can manage to get the whole party to civilisation.”
They trekked across the ice, then sailed in lifeboats to Elephant Island from where Shackleton and two companions voyaged across 800 miles of mountainous ocean to South Georgia. Shipwrecked on the wrong side of the island from their destination, the Stromness Whaling Station, they endured a 36-hour struggle over icy mountains to reach safety and organise rescue for the others. Shackleton came from a Christian family, but he was as we’d say today “spiritual but not religious”.
He was, a friend wrote, “profoundly conscious of the spiritual reality which remains hidden in all visible things”: a “higher power” he called it; a great “universal order”.
In this last phase of the journey across South Georgia, each of the three men had the same sense of a fourth presence, though they did not discuss it at the time. Later, they resolved to label it “providence” and “we left it at that”.
This providence, Shackleton believes, invites our co-operation and works with us as we entrust ourselves to it. It gives us hope when the fabric of our endurance is ground to destruction in the crushing vice of hardship. I think he was absolutely right.
But rather than “leaving it like that” the three men might have considered Christian insight: providence is personal, not an abstract force-field. Providence has a name – Father God. And Jesus accompanies us; Jesus enters into the pain of our humanity; Jesus does not always answer our questions about why things happen, but is with us in and through the pain; Jesus saves us. “I shall lose none of all those the Father has given me,” he says. Stowaways are especially welcome.
Shackleton saw providence as awesome, majestic, glorious – but never, I think, loving. Yet Jesus loves us.
We are not alone. Over the ice, through the fearful waves, across the unforgiving mountains Jesus Christ is with us.
Shackleton and the others were so battered by the journey that they were not immediately recognised on reaching the whaling station.
God sees us coming from afar, knows us, and with a heart joy-filled, runs to welcome us.
