Swinging A Hammer
The Greek word húlē can be translated
as the undifferentiated matter of creation,
and also as wood.
In the Academy Award-winning movie Coda, a hearing teenage girl sings at a school concert as her deaf parents sit in the audience. The parents see the pleasure their daughter’s voice brings others, but they cannot participate in it. They squirm with impatience. After the concert, the father sits on the tail of his truck with his daughter. “Can you sing again?” he asks in sign language. She does, and he puts his hand on her throat to feel the music. She is tentative. “Sing louder,” he signs, then places both hands near her throat, searching through his fingers. She raises her voice, singing confidently now. He smiles. He can’t hear her voice, but he can feel it. He kisses her forehead, and she leans into him.
I don’t hear God’s voice. I wish I did. I want to put my hand on God’s throat and feel him sing, but I don’t know where to put my hands. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” the psalmist says, and it’s true — sometimes I hear an echo of God’s voice when I see sunlight splashing through trees on a summer day, and the echo says, “Glory.” I know I shouldn’t want more. I hear Jesus’ admonition to Thomas — blessed are those who believe without seeing — but I ache to hear a voice, and I know that, like Thomas, I would plunge my hands in the bloody wounds to quiet my mind.
***
My grandfather was different. He believed with few questions. The youngest of twelve children, Grandad rose mythically from the farmlands of Missouri, and, dirt falling from his shoulders, he strode across the country carrying only a high school diploma until he stopped in Arizona where he accepted Jesus at a spiritual revival and found his wife, my Nonnie. My uncle would say at Grandad’s funeral that he wished Grandad had “played the grace notes of faith more often.” I am sure this is true. Yet Grandad’s children — my mother and her brothers — are grateful for the granite monolith of his faith from which they hewed off their own belief and which they, in turn, shared with their children.
I can picture Grandad bent over in a hot, dusty field as he pulled cantaloupe from wilting vines. It’s only a guess, this image, created from comments made by my mom about Grandad’s early years in Phoenix: “Your grandfather worked in the fields picking cantaloupe when he moved to Phoenix,” she told me. “It’s all he knew.” So I see Grandad as a laborer sweating in the hot Phoenix sun, and I admire his willingness to put his hands in the dirt, but I did not know him in that role. He became a successful real estate developer, and I remember him in suits and ties rather than boots and gloves. He liked to show me his garden when I visited, and young Grandad farming was the only story I had of a family member using their hands to make a living when I was very young.
Then I turned nine, and I was given a step-grandfather, Tom. He was a builder, and he was kind to me. When we drove to a family cabin north of Phoenix, I rode in the front seat of his tan El Camino pickup, and he let me play with the CB radio. I talked to his friends using the handle “Big Red” — I had bright red hair — and I joined them at the poker table in the evening. They drank Miller High Life, dipped their fingers into round tins of chewing tobacco, and pushed the shredded brown wads into their mouths, and they didn’t let me try. I remember their patience with a squirrelly, talkative kid, more bookish than handy, and I know now that they endured me rather than enjoyed my presence. Yet for all Tom’s kindness, it never occurred to me to ask about his work as a builder. Instead, I floated on the strongest currents of family legacy, in channels created by my earliest memories and most vivid family stories.
Those stories were about higher education. Professors and college administrators fill the family tree: a grandfather who taught political science, an uncle who taught English, a stepfather who was a college president. When I arrived at Westmont College for my freshman year, I felt I had come home. I knew the rules and I did well. Yet when I crossed the graduation stage with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and English, I stepped into a world that felt empty of a blueprint. I knew how to do college; I did not know how to do life. Unmoored and looking for a way to pay bills, an advertisement for a laborer on a home framing crew caught my eye. Homebuilding sounded solid, something a person of strength and purpose would do. I wanted to feel strong.
***
I purchased a leather tool belt and a twenty-four-ounce Vaughan framing hammer. It had a light brown handle and a razor-sharp waffle face. On my first day as a framer, I drove my white Camaro through a dark winter morning to a half-built home jutting out of the Phoenix desert like a skeleton. I shook the contractor’s calloused hand. His grip was hard, unyielding. Without pleasantries, he pointed to all the trash around the construction site — bits of wood, beer bottles, caulking tubes, used cardboard boxes — and told me to “scrap the site.” I put my new belt and hammer back in the car and began picking up trash. There were no AirPods in 1988, nothing to pass the time or distract me from the monotony of the work, but I was strangely determined to show the framing crew that the soft college guy could work without complaint.
It was a rough bunch, that first framing crew. Years of physical work in the sun with modest pay showed in cracked skin and, for many, frayed lives. One man lived in his van and offered to buy me something from the store with his credit card; I would then give him cash for the purchase. He needed cash badly, he said. I didn’t know how to be with them, how to talk or carry myself. I would like to say I developed a rapport, some form of camaraderie born of hard work and long days, but I did not. They did their jobs and didn’t talk much to me: Why spend time with the pale, sad college kid, the one who carved off the side of his thumb with the first swing of his new hammer?
The days were long and hot and dull. I picked up trash, fetched boxes of nails, lifted heavy beams — anything that required a young back but no skill. In the beginning, I simply endured, no more than that, but also no less. I’d like to say I tapped into an unknown reservoir of rugged endurance, but I recall only stubborn apathy. And yet, curious and bored, I began to watch the framers more closely. Loud music and jagged language filled the air, but they moved easily through the noise, their bodies fluid with purpose. I saw them drive a nail into a piece of wood with a single swing of their thirty-ounce framing hammer: tap to set the nail, and then with an effortless flip of the wrist, with the strength and memory of sinewy forearms, the nail was gone.
Over time, I was given small jobs, tasks nobody else wanted but were a novelty for me: nailing blocks in walls, cutting plywood to wrap the house, installing roof anchors. I found that I liked the physicality of the work: the feel of a two-by-four in my hand, carrying stacks of wood on my shoulder, standing on top of a stud wall to lift roof joists into place. Late one afternoon under the incessant Phoenix sun, I was on the peak of a plywood roof that stretched out clean and clear in the blue sky. U2’s Rattle and Hum played on a small radio nearby. I stood to stretch my lower back and let the breeze dry my sweat. I felt weary but good from a hard day’s work, rooted to something I had helped create.
After I had learned to navigate a job site in Phoenix (and keep my thumbs intact), I moved to Santa Barbara to join a small building crew — me, Dan, Doug, and Jim — and I worked with them for five years. Starting in the dirt of an empty lot, we built homes from foundation to finish. I learned new skills quickly and gladly: rough framing and fine woodworking, plumbing and a bit of electrical, building block walls and pouring concrete slabs. When friends or family visited a job site, I would give them a tour and an education: “This,” I would say as I gripped a piece of wood while standing in a framed doorway, “is a king stud, and this is the trimmer.” They would nod and smile vaguely.
My hands hardened with calluses, and the handle to my hammer turned dark brown, weathered by sun and sweat. “You’ve thickened up,” my brother-in-law said one day, gripping my shoulder, “you just seem more solid.” My brown leather Redwing boots strode confidently across plywood floors and into tool shops. I didn’t exactly swagger, but I did banter confidently with other builders at the lumberyard — commiserating, joking, sharing stories, trading playful barbs. It had all become, to my great surprise, my life: I built homes, and I loved building homes. And then one Thursday afternoon I drove the final nail into a redwood deck under the Santa Barbara sun, packed up my tools, and drove to Fuller Seminary to begin a master’s in theology.
At the time, leaving the trades didn’t feel like a decision but an inevitability. The steady weight of family history and my bookish inclination told me I should go back to school. And, I am ashamed to admit now, I thought homebuilding would be a lesser choice. Arrogance played a role in that, and lack of imagination. I didn’t know that Socrates may have been a stonemason, had never come across the cowboy poets, or read longshoreman Eric Hoffer’s philosophical treatise The True Believer, written after long days slinging loads on the San Francisco docks. For all the satisfaction I found in homebuilding, I didn’t think it could equal “the life of the mind.” So I hung up my tool belt, and it remains tucked away in a cupboard in my garage.
***
I have worked in higher education for thirty years, and those years have been full of challenge and growth. I am thankful for my career. And yet, at the end of the day, I feel only used up, thin. The ledgers of accomplishment always seem to balance on the side of “not enough.” Even my best days only amount to fleeting success. Expectations reach out into the future, consuming time and thoughts and energy. My work makes good things happen, and I can see the good there in the distance if I squint my eyes and look very hard, and I can name the good if I use many words. But I don’t feel it in my hands, under my feet, or in tired muscles.
When I shut my work computer at the end of the day, I sit on the couch surrounded by books and periodicals and look for ways to re-enter the family conversations I remember growing up. At holiday meals, we would clear the table after dinner and talk about faith and books and big ideas. I remember the feeling that with a little effort, and maybe a second cup of coffee, we could turn from looking at shadows on the cave wall and see the forms from which the shadows were cast. We might even catch, beyond the forms, a glimpse of the light that is the source of all goodness. This vision animates my life still: I look for the truth, and I believe truth can be found. For this, I am grateful.
Yet the truth is embodied too. I know salvation through a man who walked the earth, worked with his hands, died on a wood cross, and then staggered or strolled out of a rock tomb. He met his shocked followers face to face and ate fish with them. Many in the early church would not accept a fleshy Jesus. They experienced him as divine — doing things only God could do — so they rejected his body. How could God, who is spirit, exist in matter without being corrupted? How can the truth dwell among us with a runny nose and sweat? He only seemed to be human, these early heretics believed, and they clung to an ephemeral Jesus who floated in the thin goodness of abstraction, untouched by sunsets or tears. They worshiped the image of a man, a person who could not hold a hand, taste a strawberry, or hear a child’s voice.
During a long day at the keyboard, I’ll stop typing and pause to look at my hands. They are aging and soft, the hands of a “pencil pusher.” I remember how they looked when I built homes: rough from hard use, nicked and cut, thick and callused. They didn’t hover over the formless void, but they did create some bit of meaning from unformed matter. I wonder what type of person I would be if I had stayed in the trades. More grounded? Possibly. Calmer and easier in soul? Perhaps. Dented and frayed? Likely. It is easy, too easy, to live in George Eliot’s “imagined otherwise,” an idealized version of my life as a home builder. I remember how raw and rough the first crew felt, rubbed and torn by the physicality of the work. Worn out.
Even so, I miss the end of a day on a job site, my body loose and glad in its weariness, the sun low in the sky, the air cooling. I remember packing up my tools, standing in the middle of my work — a wall, a roof, a deck — and it was real. I could see it and touch it. “This. I did this thing today.” I miss the feel of my Skilsaw sliding through a piece of wood, the weight of a work belt on my hips, the feel of a hammer in my hand. I miss taking raw materials — wood and block and steel — and making something of use, something I knew was solid and true. I miss knowing that, for that day, what I had done was good, and it was enough.
On weekends, I sometimes wear my toolbelt to do small jobs around the house even when, perhaps, it isn’t necessary. I like how the hammer slaps against my leg when I walk, and its weight reminds me of early mornings in Santa Barbara many years ago. On my way to the job site, I would stop at Elmers Donuts for a cup of coffee and two donuts, one plain cake and one blueberry. Alone in the cab of my small brown pickup, windows rolled down, I thought about the day’s work ahead. I could hear the green toolbox rattling lightly in the back as the sun and the ocean air filled the cab. I wish I could go back and tell my younger self, “Listen to the pleasure you have in building. It could be enough.”
***
In the movie Babette’s Feast, a small church community in Denmark — aging and fractured by conflict — welcomes Babette into its midst as a cook. She had been a world-renowned chef in Paris before political turmoil forced her to flee the country. After living in the community for many years and witnessing its brokenness, she prepares a dinner, a work of culinary art, as a gift. Those she served, “knew that the room had been filled with a heavenly light, as if a number of small halos had blended into one glorious radiance … Time itself had merged into eternity.” During the meal, a speech by one of the guests compares the food to grace, an unexpected and undeserved gift — the evening begins to redeem and heal the community.
I know grace embodied, and I only know grace embodied. In the wild Galilean, to be sure. But also in my wife’s smile and touch, in a long meal with friends, in good conversation and laughter, and these graces anchor me. One day they will pass. I see my wife’s beautiful body marred by surgery, a surgery necessary to save her. I watch my parents’ aging bodies and minds fail. My brain is too often crippled by anxiety after a lifetime of striving. I ache for these losses, and my ache points me to a healing and wholeness that I know to be true in promise, and I feel God’s voice in that promise. I hear God’s voice in hope.
My children do not remember their great-grandfather, my Grandad, he of the mythical journey. They did not experience the firmness of his belief or, while making macaroni art, the clear encouragement of his wife, my Nonnie, to “always look to Jesus, only look to Jesus.” I sometimes wonder if Nonnie and Grandad’s certainty would have been more helpful to my children than my pilgrim hope. I wonder what Grandad would have thought of my restless faith. I do think he and I would have enjoyed working together on a job site, swinging hammers and building walls. I knew how to work hard. I think he would have been proud of that.
