Signature of the Maker

Grandpa's diploma from trade school

My grandfather was a carpenter, and, as he proudly would add, a cabinet maker. He had been an apprentice to a craftsman in Vienna, Austria, at the turn of the century, two centuries back now. For most of my growing up years, Grandpa, then semi-retired, had his carpentry shop in the basement of my mother's house where he continued to work until he was 92. As he got older, the size of the individual pieces of his work would get smaller, but he never stopped working, often generating multiple pieces of the the same item – footstools, jewelry boxes, Christmas creches – as gifts for his many grandchildren. 

My jewelry box

 

Inscription from my jewelry box

My own house is scattered with furniture that has been made by my grandfather. Some of these pieces were made new, entirely by him, other pieces were made around existing parts of furniture that he picked up at the side of the road on garbage night. The one common factor in all these pieces is that they are signed. Somewhere on each piece Grandpa had scrawled in pencil his name, the date, often the town where he lived when he had made the piece and sometimes who he had made it for. Later in his life, he took to writing on furniture that he had not made, but had refinished or reclaimed in some way.

Why write on a piece of furniture? I remember hearing a story as a child of a young Michelangelo, who, shortly after finishing the Pieta, overheard some men debating who they thought had actually made the piece. Michelangelo was angered that the men named other noted sculptors, but not himself. That night, he went back to the statue and carved his name boldly and very visibly across the front of the piece. It was his work. He wanted it identified as his.

Jewelry box Grandpa made for Grandma as an engagement gift

My grandfather was not quite as bold, but like an artist, he felt the need to identify his work as his own. His writing can be found on the bottom of a cabinet, under the seat of a chair, on the back of a drawer. Some of those pencil marks are now well over sixty years old. Unless someone takes the time to search for them, they might not even know that they are there. But they are present, ready to identify the object as something that was made, not manufactured, something that was, in most cases, made specifically for someone. Look for the writing. Turn the chair upside down, pull out the drawers, turn them over. The mark of the maker is there.

Inscription from heart-shaped chair

 
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. - Romans 1:20

Field Hockey Serendipity

Serendipity - the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.

I recently found myself kneeling in the garage with a cutting board and a butcher knife, doing surgery on a garden hose. The duct tape I had used to repair multiple leaks in a large section of it no longer held back the flow of water. I was planning on cutting away the leaky section, reinstalling the nifty replacement ends, and joining it to a newer hose that I had recently adopted from a friend who was moving out of state. The old hose, probably the Cadillac of hoses when new, was left behind by the previous owners of our first house...which we bought in 1983...

You might be wondering how I had gotten to this place, of salvaging a thirty-year-old hose, when I live in such a disposable society. I asked myself the same question. How did I get here? The answer: field hockey serendipity.

My youngest daughter got it into her head at an early age that she wanted to play field hockey. She went to the middle school camps for the sport and played all four years in high school. She became a good, solid field hockey player, with both skill and enthusiasm for the game. When it came to applying to colleges, she thought she might like to play at the college level. There were only a few colleges in the midwest that had field hockey teams – it's really an east coast sport – so there were only a few schools to look at if she wanted to be part of a team. One was a small Quaker college in Indiana. We went for a visit, and as I was listening to the campus tour guide, I realized that I knew very little about Quakers. If there was a chance my baby might end up in a Quaker school, I thought I had better find out about the spiritual climate I was sending her into. I went home, hit the library, and read up on everything Quaker. Well, daughter opted for Big Ten and big city over small town and field hockey in her final college choice, but I had been started on a journey to repairing thirty-year-old garden hoses...

After I read parts of the more doctrine-oriented texts in the Quaker section of the library bookshelf, I picked up a near-by book by Scott Savage - A Plain Life: Walking My Belief. This was an interesting account of a contemporary Quaker, living a “plain” life with his wife and children, and walking across the state of Ohio to turn in his driver's license as a symbol of stepping back from the world of technology. I looked to see if he had written any other books and found he had edited The Plain Reader: Essays on Making a Simple Life. This was a compilation of essays by a variety of people who had spoken at the Second Luddite Congress in Barnesville, Ohio in 1996. (The closest thing to a “first” Luddite Congress took place in 1812 as a reaction of traditional craftsmen against the coming industrial revolution.)

The Plain Reader changed my life. Well, not really changed it as much as brought out in me a somewhat dormant hereditary tendency to live more simply. The book introduced me to Bill McKibben and his wonderful writings encouraging a less consumer-based economy. (Hundred Dollar Holiday is a great book on simplifying Christmas. Deep Economy challenges one to imagine a gentler way of living in the material world.) The Plain Reader also introduced me to Wendell Berry, and led me to his non-fiction writings examining the spiritual and relational joys of living a simpler life, close to the land, surrounded by “family”. His novels took these same themes and wove beautiful stories of families and neighbors in a small farming town in the south. (Great reading!) Words like “green” and “simple” now attracted me to other reading, causing me to examine my life and my possessions and how I viewed “my stuff”. Already a composter and a recycler, I looked for more ways to reuse and not acquire additional things that I really didn't need. I came to appreciate more the things I do have.

I've always loved acquiring new knowledge and I'm particularly intrigued by the sometimes circuitous and unexpected pathways to that new knowledge. I did enjoy my years as a field hockey mom, watching my daughter play that fast-paced game with the ambiguous rules. But I am most grateful for the serendipitous way that field hockey lead me to a better way of seeing life. And I now have a thirty-year-old garden hose that no longer leaks...

A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand. - Dorothy Sayers

Pursuing God 101

I'm somewhat a minimalist in that I like to reduce big, often complicated parts of my world into their most basic and essential components. I've reduced the complex area of diet and nutrition to “Eat less. Exercise more.” My organizational philosophy to bring order and sanity to my life comes down to “Brains are for thinking. Paper is for remembering.” Proof of the existence of a spiritual evil entity I sum up in the following quote: “If the Devil don't exist, how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?”*

When my kids first left for college, being a minimalist mom, I felt compelled to send them off with a reminder of the basics of pursuing God that I hoped they had already learned. At this time of year when kids (of all ages) are leaving home and going off on their own, I decided to share some of the text from the book I gave to my kids when they first went away from the spiritual shelter of home. What follows is portions of that book, the basic and essential things I wanted them to remember about connecting with the One who loved them more than I did. (I have their permission to share this, though I have edited out the mushy personal mom stuff...)

You probably already know everything that I’m going to say in this book, but because I am such a “mom”, I needed to write it all down and give it to you anyway... Following God isn’t always easy, but it is simple. This book is just a reminder of those simple things that are involved in following Him.

Talk to Him everyday, all day. (That’s what praying is!) Remember He loves you even more than your mom and dad, (and that’s quite a lot). Tell Him everything – the good, the bad, the happy, the sad. Thank Him, praise Him, tell Him when you blew it and you’re sorry. And ask Him for what you need and, even (gasp!), for what you want. Remember God wants a relationship with you. Even though He knows everything you might tell Him, it’s the act of communicating with Him that really is what prayer is all about.

Spend some time reading the Bible every day. All of scripture is “God-breathed”, whether you can wrap your mind around that concept or not. It contains amazing truth and wisdom and it really does have a power to get to places inside of you and change things. Don’t get hung up on how to read it – just do it. Ask God to speak through the scriptures that you read. Read it in small amounts, or large, from beginning to end or hop around. Just read it! Sometimes a verse will go straight to your heart. Write it down on a card or in a small notebook so you can read it over and over again. Better yet, memorize it. Scriptural truth fixed in the mind goes deeper into the heart.

Find a good church, one that has good Bible-based teaching. Find one that fits you – the worship, the preaching style, the people. Don’t be afraid to shop around. Remember, the ultimate question to ask when looking for a church is “God, do you want me here?” There are no perfect churches, but there are churches that God has earmarked just for you. Find the one that He has for you and then become a faithful part of it. Commit to being there for worship service every week, whether you feel like being there or not. Sometimes your faithfulness in doing what you don’t feel like at the moment brings tremendous blessing into your life. The service that you almost didn’t go to is often the one that God uses to really touch your heart and change your life.

Be with other believers. This usually means finding a small group to fellowship with, pray with, study the Bible with, talk with and do fun things with. The group should be small enough that you can have impact in the lives of others in the group, and they can have impact in your life. Don’t be afraid to ask someone to pray for you or with you about something. Remember, the Lord is a very relational God. He desires to be in relationship with you but also desires that you be in relationship with other believers. A lone Christian is an oxymoron. Remember the Lord gave you talents to share with others. Some may not know Him yet, some may have known Him a long time. God will use you in both of their lives.

Remember Whose child you are…

Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life...                   - Philippians 2:14-16a 

*This last quote is borrowed from Wendell Berry's short story “Don't Send a Boy to do a Man's Work” from the book, That Distant Land.

 

The fishing has been good this summer. Lots of bass in the backyard pond and few mosquitoes...

Fishing has been a part of my life for so long that I'm no longer consciously aware of all the indicators that I am a true fisher(wo)man. I decided to make a brief self-examination and came up with these tell-tale signs of a serious obsession:

  - Summer mode of my otherwise tidy family room means three fishing rods, two spinning and one fly, sitting in the corner, rigged and read to go. With three tackle boxes on the floor...

  - When I clean up my e-mail, it always seems to be full of pictures of fishing trips. I often don't know the person in the photo, but the fish are always awesome...

 - I read Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It every summer.

  - I say I buy polarized sunglasses for driving, but really, they just make the fish easier to spot.

  - I get really annoyed by that Symbicort commercial, the one where the poor guy with COPD gets to go fishing with his son and grandson...with spinning rods...with fly reels on them...with bobbers on the end of them...wrong...wrong...wrong...

  - The lovely wooden magazine rack in the family room is stuffed with flyfishing magazines, some over twenty years old.

  - Memes like this come attached to my e-mails:

 - There's a book on my shelf entitled Reel Women.

  - A winter craft night often means tying flies.

  - My mid-life acquisition of reading glasses was provoked by my inability to see well enough to whip finish my flies.

  - I've been known, on more than one occasion, to tie customized foam flies with red hearts drawn on the spine, put them in overly cute, romantic little boxes, and give them as shower gifts to fishing couples.

  - I define torture as sitting in Common Grounds at Kenosha Harbor, watching huge fish jump two feet out of the water, knowing that I only have a Illinois fishing license.

  - Linda Greenlaw and Joan Salvato Wulff are my heros.

  - Eating dinner early in the summer is incentive to have more fishing time before the mosquitoes come out.

  - 95% of my mosquito bites are fishing-acquired. (I just don't know when to come in...)

  - Anything that requires 20-60 minutes of oven cooking time allows for 20-60 minutes of fishing in the backyard, provided I remember to put the kitchen timer in my pocket.

 - Lastly, the name of this blog, The Angle, comes from the title of the first book on fishing, written by a woman who was a 15^th century nun. (See blog post #1.)

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.

- From A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean

Quieting Down

I've finally “got” silence...

Got it in the sense of remembering its purpose, but also in the sense of reclaiming its place in my life...

Silence has always been near and dear to me, off-the-scale introvert that I am. I need times of quiet to re-energize myself after times of social interaction. Silence is also the place where I would go to meet with God. I recently listened to an on-line interview* with Ian Morgan Cron who said some interesting things about silence in the church. He quoted Mother Teresa as having said, “Silence is God's first language. Everything else is a poor translation.” (To be accurate, it's a quote by a Fr. Thomas Keating.) I'm not sure I would completely agree with the quote, but I understand the heart place where it comes from. I think I would have said instead that silence is the 4G network of God, that everything else is insufficient bandwidth. Anyway, it got me thinking about silence and its place in my life. Ironically, I was doing my thinking on one of my walks, iPod music persistently playing in my head. I thought about how I used to walk in silence, pre-iPod, how I used to drive without the radio or CD player on, how I never turned the TV on during the day before the 5 p.m. news. In the past, prayer time had had a lot more silence, too, instead of the incessant one-way conversation - “I want...”, “They need...” - that it sometimes feels like now. I decided it was time to revisit silence.

There's a pond and wetlands that back up to our house, and one late afternoon, I took a chair out back with the intention of just sitting in silence for awhile, enjoying God's presence and His creation. As I sat quietly sipping a cup of tea, I was struck by how much noise was going on within the silence -birds, each with a different call; the swallows pecking for who-knows-what in the rain gutters of our house; the whisper of the breeze rubbing the marsh grass leaves together; the frogs croaking; the splash of bass, chasing smaller fish in the shallow water; the hum of bees; the chirp of crickets; the plunk and buzz of someone fishing on the other side of the pond with a lure guaranteed to drive bass crazy. I live in this beautiful piece of wetland wilderness and I regretted not taking the time to quiet myself and hear, really hear the wondrous sounds that are always emanating from it. It then occurred to me that a good part of the the purpose of silence is not for the quiet itself but for the ability to hear what is in that quiet, the quiet, small, but vital, voices within that silence.

The Bible is full of references to this relationship between silence and hearing - “Keep silence and hear, O Israel”; “...there was silence, then I heard a voice...”; “Men listened to me and waited and kept silence for my counsel”; “For God alone my soul waits in silence”; “Listen to me in silence, O coastlands...”** - and on and on. The classic ways in which we hear God – through His Word, through others, through our circumstances, through that still small voice. – all require a quietness or silence on our part. I can read Proverbs until my eyes bleed, but if I don't ask God “What do You want me to hear in this for my life today?” and then take the time to be quiet before Him, I may not get beyond a cursory understanding of what I have read. The same holds true for listening to other people, listening to our circumstances. I have to be quiet, if not silent, to hear the wisdom of others, to hear what this present circumstance is saying about this season of my life. And the Still Small Voice – the one I usually recognize to be too wise, too profound to be my own thought – requires both the desire to hear it and the silence to recognize it for what it is, God speaking into my life.

I've said enough. I'll be quiet now and go and find a place to be silent for awhile. Join me?

I’m wondering why we’re so uncomfortable with silence, and if our discomfort isn’t a warning light on our dashboard. Maybe comfort in silence could be considered a personal health goal.

                                                                                        - Donald Miller

*On Donald Miller's blog, http://storylineblog.com/2013/06/23/sunday-morning-sermon-the-importance-of-silence/

**Deuteronomy 27:9; Job 4:16; Job 29:21; Psalm 62:1Isaiah 41:1