Manure & Ice

I don’t remember why I was chasing the butterscotch cat. It darted out of sunlight into the dusty shadows of my cousins’ barn. I followed at breakneck speed.

My grandparents kept a tidy barn with a floor that wasn’t slick with a film of silt, hay, and manure, but my cousins didn’t hold to such standards. So imagine my surprise when my feet slipped from under me and I found myself falling forward with arms outstretched Superman-style. My flight was not sustainable and I hit the floorboards with a smack and a splat and a long, messy skid.

Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn’t the last time I would rush into a place I didn’t need to be, chasing after something that wasn’t mine.

I also had a wintertime adventure at that farm. There was enough of a hill for sledding, and we made the most of it. With a running start, we could get up enough speed to make it across a flat stretch of yard, and then out onto the frozen duck pond.

The more we sledded, the faster the track became, until we were getting as far as halfway across the pond. Late in the day I decided to really throw myself into it and see what would happen. I hit the packed snow at the perfect angle and velocity. I gripped the steering wings of the Flexible Flyer, and held my boots up to keep from dragging on the track behind me. The sled’s red blades kicked up bits of snow and ice that pelted my face and made my eyes water.

When I reached the edge of the pond I could feel that I had enough speed to make it all the way across the ice. I squinted into the stinging draft, scanning for a good place to stop. The far side of the pond was thick with dead reeds that poked up through the mottled ice like big brown straws. It was swampy and not solidly frozen, but this realization crystallized in my mind a blink too late.

I crashed into the reeds and broke through the ice into scummy pond water. Fortunately, it was too shallow for anything disastrous to happen. I was drenched and chilled, and done sledding for the day, but otherwise none the worse for the wear.

Bookend stories of reckless abandon that ended badly, but not catastrophically: I keep retelling them, trying to decipher their meaning. Does wisdom require me to attenuate my adventurous impulses? Should I frame my curiosity within the bandwidth of safe outcomes? Can I touch the sacred without making direct contact with the stuff of the earth? Is there any faith without danger?

Clay

The mound of clay is cool and moist in my hands. It feels primal and grounding. It feels like promise.

I roll it and flatten it repeatedly, removing bits of grit and closing air pockets. The clay responds to the warmth of my hands and becomes gradually softer. When its texture is pliable, strong and consistent, I ball it up and take it to the wheel.

I throw the heavy lump down onto the spinning platter, and firmly cup my hands around it. I guide it into the hub of the wheel’s energy. I touch the clay with water, and begin coaxing the dome into a cylinder. Pulling it up, and pushing it back down until it seems ready for an opening.

What will this pot hold someday? Carnations, coins, cream, coffee… I push my thumbs gently into its center and begin shaping its emptiness. I expand the void slowly, allowing the clay time to adjust.

When it’s right, I stop the spinning and pull a cutting wire through the base of the pot to release it from the wheel. Its shape is perfect, but its structure is tender. It still needs to experience fire.

Red

Red didn’t belong there in the coarse, sticky green. It caught my eye like a gem, nestled down in the grass under the clothesline. It was a little stub of crayon that had most likely fallen from the pocket of a piece of clothing hanging there.

Ironically, large size crayons were made for small size hands. But I never liked these chubby implements very much because it was impossible to render any real detail with them. I preferred the smaller sort; felt-tip markers were even better.

It was obvious that someone had liked this red log though, since both ends were rounded from use. And both edges of the stiff paper wrapper had been peeled back to expose more color.

I reached down to pick it up. My thumb and index finger closed upon it with an accuracy of pressure perfected by at least seven years of experience with the hardness of crayons. But my squeeze met nearly no resistance at all. The crayon yielded in an entirely unexpected way.

It had melted in the summer sun. Until I squeezed it, the stubby cylinder had retained its form. It was a bewildering, delightful and inexplicably gratifying sensation. In that moment I discovered the potential softness of crayons. And I learned that the faraway sun is near enough to change stuff here on earth.

Not many summers later I was with my gang of friends in one of our favorite unsupervised spots. It was nothing more than a few undeveloped acres of hillocks, bracken and small trees set between two neighborhoods and an apartment complex. Its virtue was that grownups had no reason to go there. We, on the other hand, had an excellent reason for being there: Billy Sass had firecrackers and matches. I think he’d gotten them from a cousin who’d been to South Carolina on vacation.

Firecrackers were a rarity in New York since they had to be purchased out of state. Their detonation was an event to be savored. Earlier that day we’d melted a red candle and molded its wax around the firecrackers. The idea was to make the explosion more dramatic. Blowing stuff up was without question the coolest thing that could be done with a firecracker.

Being boys, we all had to get our hands in on the action of arranging the ordnance and supervising the twisting together of fuses. We watched the red match-head scrape along the matchbook’s rough strip, and heard the successful burst of fire. A pungent whiff of sulfur wafted into the air. We watched the fragile cardboard stick move toward the fuse and hoped no breeze would blow it out. We waited for a spray of sparks from the tips of the fuses to signal us to scamper backward from our tight circle.

This particular braid of fuses burned faster than expected. My hand was the last one to pull back from the blast zone. There was a flash, a bang, a sharp sting, and the alarming sight of red. For a gasp’s length I thought the skin had been blown off of my left hand. Fortunately, it was only covered with wax shrapnel.

Red gets my attention. It usually means something important is happening. After a knock on the head I instinctively touch the injured site and check for blood on my fingers. At times I’ve felt the sweet relief of seeing none there. Other times, when my fingers have returned from the site wet and smudged with red, I’ve felt my anxiety level rising sharply. In both instances the pain might be identical, but my degree of concern differs according to the color I see.

At this time of year, along with most Christians, I look toward Golgotha – “the place of the skull” – and force myself to again behold the horror of my Savior stained red. The written accounts of his anguish create vivid, troubling images in my mind. My faith compels me to believe that Jesus had to suffer as he did, but I remain unable to understand why. I wish from my core that it could have been otherwise.

This year I have the opportunity to view a filmmaker’s depiction of the most disturbing, most humbling, and in a sense the most private scene of my faith. By all accounts, his use of red in the film is copious. If I choose to see it, I expect that it will grab my insides and not let go. It will probably never let go. That’s the cinematographer’s intent.

But with or without the movie’s help, I will think about Jesus over these next few weeks, worn and bloody – exposed and vulnerable, his divine covering peeled back. I’ll remember his softness to my distress and anxiety, and I’ll be reminded that God is near enough to change stuff here on earth.