Trees, wood, and work.

It’s odd, I admit, my penchant for thanatopsis. I should blush at the age I currently am at such musing, but this is old hat for me. I suppose a raising in a fundamentalist Christian sect is at least partly responsible for a predisposition to consider what happens after this; the additional contributors to my condition I can really only guess at.
My conscious mind at least has for the last decade been resolved to spend a greater amount of time examining this current existence, not an unknown future one. But the emotional legacy of the concept of afterlife is inescapable, and the occasional points when it blossoms are now bright, poignant, and generally as close as I ever come to real tears. Reading the obituary so gracefully written for David Crocco (Scantlings 144) is my latest point for poignancy, and recognizing what he may have taken with him as he passed this life reminds me of the profundity of this life’s endeavors. It also makes it conceivable that one day I can actually consider both this life and the possibility of the next one without summoning up the demons of my early twenties that insisted it was one or the other, buddy.
To know that a man so devoutly Catholic (in a world where most of the Catholics I know preface their religion with the word recovering) was buried with a mallet and a chisel does in fact make my heart leap. Was he buried as a Catholic, or as a carpenter? At the end of it all, will there be a difference? Noble as David’s devoutness was, I cannot help but believe that his reverence, and mine, are tied to work. I would dare to observe that Catholicism’s ritual may be its reverence, hardly different from the rhythm and ritual of work for me or many of you. I, as a worker, can understand daily Mass. What begs now to be understood is how much reverence we are ever brought in to, and how much of reverence is us.
For the last few years, in fact since the 2006 Guild conference in Parksville, B.C., when a friend and I took a day trip to see the old growth Doug fir forest nearby, I’ve only understood one sacred place for myself, and it’s the woods. As surely as lack of faith is unfathomable to the faithful, I honestly have no concept of how anyone could enter those moss-grown wonderlands of mammoth trees and not understand both reverence and sanctity. I thank (insert deity here) that I cannot unfeel the reverence there and that in a life where the struggle between the felt and the known has never abated and the known has generally been fed, I cannot resist trees and wood and work at this deepest of levels.
There’s been significant reason in the last two years of my working life to ask the question, “What the hell are you doing?” Among other harsh realities about what work is for me, I now face the frank truth that I am, in fact, poor. And always, really, have been as a working man. Thank goodness I don’t really care, and that even my cognitive measurements for success are very lightly weighted toward the material. But why is it acceptable, when it would seem likely that I’m smart enough and talented enough to do a whole lot of other things where poverty would be less of a cousin to life? Because my reverence is work, and my sacred is wood. Because building is so unbelievably profound I cannot describe it, but once in awhile I chance to read an obituary of a man I really barely knew who took to his grave a mallet and a chisel, and I am completely floored. I can only assume there was a rosary and a bible in there, but the reporter I must thank noticed what I would have noticed, and I think felt what I feel. The honor and desperate responsibility of living as a carpenter, as a builder. Takes my breath away.
I feel a good part of the time like John the Baptist, described first in Isaiah and then in the gospels as “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.” Our building industry generally disgusts me, for a list of reasons so long I wouldn’t dare to include it here, but most of all because it seems to miss the profound in the mundane, the sacred in the daily, the honor in building. It wallows in mediocrity, waste, ignorance, inefficiency, and dishonor. Do we, as this curious mix of artisan, craftsman, and worker, have any opportunity to stem the tide? Will we ever be able to look a commercial project manager in the eye, and convince ourselves he really gives a shit?
Rather than dwell on that any more, I’m ready to give thanks for brethren in work. We’ve all got our own style, probably would fight like dogs if we were trapped on the same jobsite long enough, and often must resign ourselves to agreeing to disagree. But brotherhood there is, and I tip my hat to all of you who work, who build, and thank you for the opportunity to meet, to congregate, to digress, to commiserate, and then to leave again, each to our separate corners of this godless world of building to try to make a difference. Where worship may fit in this grand analogy I can’t yet say, at least in part because I cannot fully deny the voice in my head that warns against idolatry with reminder of the severest of consequences for the disobedient.
We’re all smart enough to get better paying jobs, but apparently too religious to do so. We lend our bodies in a great way, our minds, our divinity––to buildings. And I daresay they are sacred for it, and as close to something timeless as we humans appear to be able to prove we’ve ever been part of.

––Adrian Jones