The Liturgy of Log Splitting
Splitting logs has to be close to divine revelation. The other day when I was preparing some unwieldy logs for the fireplace, I was fascinated by the way the wood split along its own intriguing lines. Grace notes filled the air when a log split right. But, timber can be testy, too, like the log that stubbornly refused the wedge. Weary with trying, I said, “OK, Hardhead, I can wait. Save your music for another day.”
I have grown a bit weary of the many religious panaceas that ask us to jump out or our skin, get out of the world, or remove ourselves from the ordinary to get a divine fix. Wherever did we get the idea that we could cure whatever is wrong with us by going to the right seminar, practicing some new discipline, finding the right doctor, or hearing a heaven-sent preacher? Yes, these can be splendid and can send our souls soaring. But they can let us down, too.
The liturgy of log splitting revealed to me that the everyday, grubby world is not a wasteland. Evangelism does not require a raid on the mundane. For example, one day I was talking with a non-church-going neighbor who was recovering from a debilitating paralysis, and I heard him say, “When I was suffering I often cried out, ‘Why me, God?’ But in all the years when I was healthy, did I once ask that question?” His word to me was a log that showed all the grain of a cruciform split.
So why not look for Life in the very place we live, in the things we have to do whether we like them or not, in the neighbors we didn’t choose next door, and in the untidy, irascible, foxy, joyously human world in which God keeps trying to get through to us?!