There is an amazing staircase in Arizona. It is called "St. Joseph's Staircase". It is the result of a desperate nun's prayer and a mysterious wanderer who built it. It serves a rather mundane purpose, the staircase up to the choirloft in a small chapel built in the late 1800's, but to the nuns who built the chapel, it came to mean everything: but mostly, in the end, as a metaphor for faith and how God works with each of us.
In the movie about the staircase, the story goes that the mysterious carpenter, "Joad", knows that the available wood in the area will not be flexible enough for the curvature required, but that he needs a special wood which is deemed to hard to get hold of. He then tells the Mother Superior, who is very emotionally involved in the completion of the chapel, that he will try to build it with the oak wood that is available.
He works for weeks and weeks, soaking, shaping, bending and dowling the wood (no nails are used in the staircase). As the staircase goes up slowly, Joad realizes that the wood is not flexible enough and is pulling apart the form of the staircase. He speaks to the Mother Superior, and she falls apart in frustration. She wants to build this chapel for God, and "what use is a chapel without music"?
Quietly, Joad says in reply: "No. The wood is not right for building this staircase. But it is right for building faith."
Once the Mother Superior is forced to simply let her work go, Joad is able to go and get the long-leaf pine he needs, and as the Mother is dying, he completes the staircase: and it is truly a work of art, mirroring most the interior structure of a conical shell.
I have long loved that line: "not perfect for building staircases, but perfect for building faith".
How often in the last months have I grown more and more aware that the wood with which I am made, the materials native to me with which I am trying to build sanctity is not right in the sense in which I expect. How often have I come to a pass in which I cry, "I am not able to handle this". I feel myself pulling apart, wretched knotty and stiff oakwood, knarled and stubborn in my desires and habits.
I have begun to ask the Lord to remake me in long-leaf pine, which one can only get by traveling up to the mountains, His mountains. I can't get the wood myself, and I can't be shaped into a woman of real faith until I am made of something other than what is in me now.
I do think I understand, though, that the experience of being oak and trying to build and finally pulling apart at the seams is within His plan; in that He can only change our structure and substance with the aquiescence of our will; and that only truly comes when we have humililty. Humility, in turn, comes when we can see ourselves for the oak we truly are without Him.
