The Right Wood for Building Faith

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.

Magnificat

Icon: Mary of the Magnificat, Mother of the Poor by Fr. W. McNichols

Today is May 13, Mother's Day; and also the 90th anniversary of the first appearance of Our Lady of Fatima in 1917. I was thinking today that I am so glad to be able to put that Mother's Day emotion somewhere beyond me.

Mother's Day still reminds me of my grandma's rose water perfume: I suddenly feel like a child again, find myself thinking about my mother. It is still slightly surreal to be the Mom. I loved the little cards, especially my older daughter's which read: "Dear Momy, do'nt be depressed.". It is telling that she knew how to spell 'depressed'. I realized then the mixture of love and pain I was for her and I felt ashamed, I have to admit.

I was glad to get to Mass where the focus was not just on us rabidly imperfect moms, but was also on a Mother who was given the grace to be what we all imagine a mother to be: a soul who magnified the Lord. I think of her, a mother so young, who with the ardor and freshness of that youth-and also a soul full of grace- laid down her soul and her life before God as she said her "Fiat". I think of her sitting outside Bethlehem under a tree waiting for Joseph to return with news, any news, of a place to stay, her anxiety quelled by the closeness of God inside her. I think of her standing at the entrance to the temple, listening to Simon and imagining swords piercing her heart, knowing the untameable nature of Him who chose her. And I cannot imagine her at the cross, I cannot fathom what she would have looked like at that moment; perhaps Michelangelo's Pieta comes closest, with the carved face exuding a mysterious mixture of love and regal suffering, empty of revenge or anger.

In all of these vignettes, she remains for me a soul who magnifies the Lord. We are defined by what we chose to magnify, or to give praise. If it is ourselves, we are selfish, thin tornados darkening the skyline in our search for the gratification of the self. If we praise and give glory to Mother Nature above all else, we become mere cogs in a system and devalue the soul of ourselves and others. If we praise a nice house and a comfortable life, we become either eaten slowly by fruitless envy or the powerful silver-sleek lord of the freeway and byway. Whoopie- that's a low bar to shoot for in the real scheme of things (but it is sure tempting).

Whether or not we praise or give glory to something or someone does not change the real value of that thing or person. A classic car remains that whether or not we praise it. It might sell for more, but the metal and wheels are the same (whalah- the secret of the advertising industry revealed for the banal thing it is). The praise and glory we give changes us, not the object or the person. The higher or more noble the value of what or who we praise, the more noble we are. Therefore, those who praise material wealth are, in a sense, making themselves less noble than the person who praises world peace or charity work.

However, only One is really worth our praise, our highest praise: only One takes our praise of Him and makes us a child of the Divine. All else, even the work for the poor done without His glory in mind, falls far short of Him. God does not need our praise to be glorious. He is, and was, and ever shall be, perfect and full of every good thing. He is Love, He is Glory. He does not need us. But love, by nature, is creative and empties itself out for the good of the lesser. He is due our praise because of His very Being and because all things were and are made because of Him: and we can only be truly human and truly ourselves when we praise Him and give Him glory. When our souls do nothing less than magnify the Lord, we are full of His grace.

This, in every aspect of her life, was Mary's privilege- not because of her own intrinsic worth, but because of the role God called her to and His love for her. She was the new Ark of the Covenant, carrying God within her; and just as the Ark of the Israelites was carefully constructed by God's instructions, just as it was to be kept sacred, so was Mary. In that fullness of grace, her soul magnified God- like the light in a room increases as it is reflected, so did the light of God in the world increase by Mary's choices and by the beauty of a human soul as it was meant to be.

So on Mother's Day, I was glad to look away from my own imperfections as a mother and a person, and see once again what I am trying to become. It gives me hope that a simple girl from the backwater of Judea was given the grace to magnify God, becoming by this a glorious soul in the garden of God. I know that God loves us and being Love, wishes us all to become Magnifiers of His Glory. Our Lord Himself deigns to be placed upon our altars to mingle as a lover does, with our very physical and spiritual nature. He desires nothing more that our greatest good, which is contained in this simple phrase: "My soul magnifies the Lord".

Our destiny is certainly lofty, and I almost feel that perhaps a tiny corner of my heart is beginning to reflect although I am slowed in my ardor and hope by the amount of grime I still see He must scrub off the rest. I think of all the spiritual Brillo pads coming and cringe. But it is that tiny corner that responds in hope and love as we sing the Ave Maria around the garden outside the Shrine of St. Joseph on a sunny May day.