The Gift of the Gradual

Look at the trunk of the nearest tree. In 365 days it adds just 1/16th of an inch to its thickness. It grows most of that lighter wood during warm weather, and then as the cold slows this growth down, the darker “ring” forms, showing in the grain of the wood when it is fashioned into furniture.

I’ve been blessed to have built a number of pieces of church furniture: altars, pulpits, tables and such. At St. Gregory of the Great church in Detroit, Fr. Ron DeHondt had come to understand the value of preaching to his mostly African-American parishioners, and to respect their Baptist roots. So he asked me to remove the now unused sixty year old wooden communion rail and refashion it into a pulpit and a baptismal font. The communion rail had for fifty years been the place where those attending Mass would come to receive communion. They would kneel on it for just a few seconds, their folded hands lightly touching the wood of the rail. So I thought of that wood as holy, thinking of all of the communicants who had knelt at it all of those years from long before I was born.

When a woodworker builds a piece of furniture, the parts are made from boards that are uniform in thickness, flat on all sides. That way, the joints all fit snugly. Working with old wood is an added challenge, because over the years, the wood wears down, and the surfaces become irregular. So those old boards need to be resurfaced in order to mate cleanly when they are assembled with others. I sat in my workshop looking at the oak handrail, rounded and worn by momentary contact of 250 people x 4 Masses x 52 Sundays x 50 years: 2,600,000 human touches. Oak is a very hard wood. Human skin is soft. Yet deep depressions in that hardwood communion rail had been made by the momentary touch of two and a half million people like you and me kneeling to accept on their tongues the bread that they reverently regarded as the body of the Son of their God.

I could not submit that board from the top of the communion railing to my machines, to turn years of sacred moments into sawdust for the sake of precision. I rather found reverent, respectful ways of using that particular wood in parts of the new pulpit and new baptismal font that would celebrate this holy wear, this patient patina. It was not surprising that the finished pulpit and font showed the results of this reverent fabrication. They looked as if they had been in that church all along. I considered it the height of praise when a parishioner asked, on seeing the pulpit for the first time, “Where did you find it?”

In our Lenten practices of the Examen and Entering the Stories, we may experience some flashes of lightning, some unforgettable moments of illumination. But in dailyness of these practices and in the repeated reminder that we are given by daily fast or “giving something up” or intentional good works, we gradually wear through the barrier between our ordinary selves and that perfect self within, that image of ourselves that mirrors the image of our creator. The stain and varnish of our fears and compulsions are worn away, exposing our natural beauty, the bright pattern of our grain, each line grown by 365 risings and settings of the sun.

While the gift of suddenness is illumination, the gift of the gradual is strength and resilience.


FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.