Trodden Beneath Time
The soil feels ready. I can feel it. Its movements are small, imperceptible, almost silent, like the first pecks of a chick on hatching day. But the life is there, and it can be sensed, can be witnessed. In the mid-Eighties, back in my good Protestant days, a gospel singer named Sandi Patti released an album titled “Morning Like This.” The title track’s lyrics, exploring the physical and metaphysical events of the morning of Christ’s resurrection, contained the words
Did the grass sing?
Did the earth rejoice to feel You again?
This is what my spirit sensed this morning in the misty woods, moving as silently as I could among the trees and rocks, watching the cows across the fields, aware of the birds keeping watch over me, tickled by the chipmunk who zipped across my path, his tennis racket of a tail held high as he went. I felt the grass itself clearing its throat, preparing to warm up, readying itself for the coming recital. I could feel the rocks straightening themselves, watching their Maker with expressions that said, even though stoic, “We are ready to cry out if You but speak the word to us.”
The trees are budding, the woody grape vines are shifting as they fill with sap and demonstrate the principle of natural hydraulics. Among all the trees in my woods, the dogwoods alone seem dormant and still. But I stopped to rest at the edge of the south pasture and leaned against one, and I again had the sensation of touching an egg with a chick inside. The life-force stirs, and no other force under the stars can stop it or turn it aside.
A while ago, I lit a cone of good incense on my little altar in the spare bedroom, the last cone in the box. Out came the scissors and I made two bookmarks from the box because I liked the colors and design. I have never cared for store-bought bookmarks, and as I trimmed these two sandalwood-scented ones, I thought about why this might be so. And my mind led me back to a sunny kitchen so many years ago, when my grandmother (“Nanny”) laboriously cut out the picture of a cabin with smoke streaming from the chimney and gave it to me. The picture had been on a package of bacon, and I was delighted with the bright colors of the cabin, and especially with the unusual shape of what Nanny had given me. The plume of smoke went up from the chimney, then curved to the left above the log cabin in the illustration. Nanny had cut the scene in a rectangle but had trimmed around the smoke with care, giving the cut-out a distinctive form. So this morning I realized that my homemade bookmarks have always been and continue to be a tribute to the found art of my mother’s mother, the tough old woman who used to make me silver-dollar pancakes in the frying pan and bathe her scowling old yellow cat in a galvanized steel bucket.
***
Not far from here, a police officer in his sixties was killed by a mentally disturbed man. The officer had been called to the home to check on the welfare of a man who had been reported by family as acting erratically. When Sgt. Steve Hinkle approached the house, the man fired shots. During the subsequent standoff, the suspect, a Mr. Pendergrass, shot Sgt. Hinkle. By the time police stormed the house, Mr. Pendergrass was dead, presumably by his own hand. Sgt. Hinkle died later at the hospital.
Today Sgt. Hinkle was honored by the community and by his fellow police officers. A large funeral procession made its way from the funeral home to the gravesite. Clearly, Sgt. Hinkle was admired, respected, and loved by those who knew him and worked with him, and some of them organized prayer vigils both before and after his death. This is right and proper, and I am confident Sgt. Hinkle’s family appreciates all that has been done for the fallen officer.
My wife and I feel compelled to pray for the family of the man who shot Sgt. Hinkle, the late Mr. Pendergrass. We talked at lunch today about how it would feel to learn that a family member had become unbalanced and had murdered another person. We cannot know Mr. Pendergrass’s state of mind nor his motives nor the path of his life that led him to point a gun out of his window on that day. But we can know with reasonable certainty that his family and friends and loved ones are not to blame for his actions. We can be certain that some of them are deeply hurt and confused by his actions on his final day in this life. And we wonder if anyone is praying for his family, or praying for mercy and the repose of his soul? We are praying for these things, and if anyone reading this post is so inclined, we ask that you pray for Mr. Pendergrass and for his grieving, wounded family. May the Lord of all life show much mercy to all those who have been shaken by these sad events.
***
The dividing line between our property and my neighbor’s pastures has long been a decrepit barb-wire fence. The wire has long been loose and full of gaps, and the once-strong cedar posts have grown weathered and moss-coated and bird-drilled and canted and rotten. Recently, my neighbor asked my permission to cut and clear trees and brush along the fence line five or six feet onto my land so that he could set new posts and erect sturdy new fencing. I agreed to his request, and his son and a team of helpers has made quick work of the project. Now when I go up to the property line, I see the new fence marching across from east to west. Everything looks neat and tidy, with the tangles of brush and saplings and vines gone, and the bulldozed earth clear and packed. It’s quite clean, and I think the apt word would be “improved.”
And yet I am not so sure.
Already, I miss the ancient, rustic charm of the old posts, the way they seemed to lean away from the sun and the wind, their splintered tops, their angular shadows, their picturesque sternness, their utter photographability. The new fence has the look of….a barrier. A prison, even.
Just on the other side of the fence used to sit a rock. It was about the size of a dinner plate, rather flattish on top, with a little divot in it, as if God had taken an ice cream scoop to the rock when it was still cooling on the day of its creation. The divot always caught rainwater, and I have seen Carolina wrens drink from it. Some time ago, I found another rock in the dirt nearby, this one an absolutely perfect cube, as symmetrical as if it had been measured and carved from a block of cheddar. The day I found the cube rock, I took it to the scooped-out rock and placed it inside the divot. For years now, every time I have walked in my neighbor’s pastures, I have stopped at the scooped rock, lifted the cube rock and touched it to my lips, replaced it, and continued on. Little meaningless rituals can actually come to have great importance at the hours of dawn or dusk.
But since the fence project began, the scooped rock and the cube rock have disappeared. They have been crushed or at least pushed far down into the muddy earth by the treadmill tonnage of the bulldozer running back and forth. I would not blame anyone for thinking me foolish for feeling a sense of grief and loss when I realized that I would never see the two stones again. I like to think that someday, in another age, someone will be planting a garden or clearing a yard, and the spring thaw will push the scooped rock and his partner the cube rock up through the mud and into the light and air again. They may be mere stone splinters by now, but then again, they may not. No matter their shape or condition, they may yet cry out beyond many lauds and complines.
And there’s this — with the old fence, when I wanted to walk in the far pastures and see the flocks of wild turkeys beyond the ridge, I simply pushed down the top strand of barbed wire, swung my leg over, and was on my way. But this new six-foot tall welded-wire affixed firmly to new pressure-treated posts will not allow such property-line peccadillos. There will be no more stepping over. In order to walk my neighbor’s fields, I will have to be intentional and I will have to be carrying a ladder. My manner of contemplative walking will allow for neither. There will be no more pasture walks on his land, it seems.
***
But I can remain within my woods and be content, because I have a cathedral there. This is a well-used simile, but the woods truly do resemble a cathedral to the reverent eye. Branches for ceiling beams, vines and bushes for walls and tapestries, leaves and pine needles for carpeting, and countless holes and hollow stumps that serve as fonts and baptistries. Choirs of birds and the incense of bloom and blossom, and the vast pipe organ of wind that swells from its Breather’s pedals, up into the ready and ringing air.
And a cathedral could so easily become a monastery, if only I, the one tramping clergy on its grounds, could devote my life to the rhythm of its hours and the cycle of its holy existence, not being called away to work in the world, but being allowed to stay, to cloister myself within cedar and honeysuckle and blackberry and pine. Ever since reading Merton’s “The Seven Story Mountain” many years ago, I have been fascinated with monasteries and convents and monks and nuns. When I sat in Protestant pews, I thought of such people as silly, deluded, and certainly as great time-wasters. To devote one’s self entirely to prayer and contemplation…what a squandering of one’s life!
Ah, but life and the Giver of all life has taught me how wrong I was. In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the great king pours out his worried heart in a prayer the night before the battle of Agincourt, and in asking for mercy and victory, he reminds Almighty God
Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay
Who twice a day their withered hands hold up
Toward heaven, to pardon blood. And I have built
Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests
Sing still for Richard’s soul. More will I do—
Though all that I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon.
Who can say that the monks and nuns who chant prayers through the night do not sway God to delay judgment and wrath? Who can say for certain that these souls with withered hands do not help keep the world in a balance of mercy and grace as they recite the Divine Office while the rest of us are walking in the lanes of sleep and dreams? Who can say that our Father does not use their spiritual efforts as a means to prevent tragedies and wars and ruined crops?
And who can guarantee that when the deer bed down in my woods that they do not bring a sweet-scented blessing to this little farm? Who can testify that the owls nesting in my barn do not keep evil at bay, or that the possums scurrying across the garden do not sanctify the soil with their little feet? These little ones do not, after all, commit sins against their Maker. They do exactly what He asks them to do. Perhaps they do more service than we can compass. Perhaps the monks who right now are saying Vespers are mightier than regiments of armed warriors?
I myself am unwilling to claim they waste their time who devote their waking hours to praise and intercession. Oh, to be able to walk beneath the tree limbs and talk to my Father all the day long. I do not think this would be a waste. No, not at all.
The green things of the winter earth are slumbering, yes. But they are beginning to stir. They are preparing to awaken. Even as the sun goes down in the west tonight, it prepares to come up in the east in just a few short hours. If I awaken between now and the dawn, will I hear, on the clef of the night air, the chants and songs and canticles of humble, anonymous souls who lift their hands towards heaven in their candlelit halls?
~ S.K. Orr