by James Martin
Working with his hands often helped get his mind off of his mind. Until he began architecture school, Mark always had a job that required physical activity. As a teenager he mowed lawns and even started a small yard-work business with three of his high-school friends. As the lawnmower rumbled beneath him, he thought of how many of his neighbors’ lawns he could have mowed with this monster.
In college, at Northeastern, while trying to decide on a major, he stumbled on a job with a middle-aged carpenter in Cambridge. Mike, a friend of his father’s, ran a flourishing business fixing up old houses in tony towns on Cape Cod and in wealthy South Shore towns like Hingham and Cohasset. At the beginning of his apprenticeship Mark was allowed to do only simple tasks, like measuring and sanding, but by the summer of his junior year in college he was entrusted with something that gave him great pride: building, on his own, three matching bookcases for a library in an elegant home being renovated on the Cape. The owners, an elderly couple who had both taught at Harvard, said that it was their favorite part of their home.
One night Mark told his parents how proud he was that he had built them on his own, and his father praised him, but reminded him, gently, “Mike taught you, didn’t he?”
Mark started up the hill, the trickiest part of mowing the abbey lawn. Occasionally he worried about the mower flipping over, though it never had, and Brother Robert told him that if Brother Thomas could mow the lawn, then so could Mark. Apparently, Brother Thomas was pretty hopeless with machines. Ten years ago, he totaled two of the monastery’s cars before the abbot at the time made him promise that he would always ask someone else to drive him. “Is this a vow?” asked Brother Thomas. “As far as I’m concerned it is,” said the abbot.
As he looked at the storage shed, which needed a paint job, Mark thought about how little carpentry work he had done at the monastery. Early in his stay, he built two pine shelves for the jam factory’s storage facility, but since then hadn’t been called upon to do much else. And for the past few weeks he seemed to have done nothing but paint and plaster. Did the builders construct the abbey so that it would spring leaks every few weeks? For a solid-looking building, it wasn’t sturdy at all. “The original builders had to cut some corners,” Father Paul admitted once. “Donations weren’t as robust as what the archbishop had anticipated.”
Mark grew frustrated that his hopes to do more carpentry at the abbey had largely come to naught. He briefly closed his eyes when he recalled his dream, which seemed stupid now, that he would become a renowned local carpenter whose work everyone would flock to see at the abbey. The famous abbey carpenter, he thought, and grimaced.
As he bumped over the ground, Mark struggled with a persistent demon: thinking about his friend Dave’s life. Married to a wonderful woman, with a good job in Philly and a second child on the way, Dave seemed to have all that Mark wanted, and Mark was ashamed to realize that he was envious. He hated that feeling. Yet he didn’t seem to be able to help himself. If only he had taken a different job out of school. If only he had listened to people at the firm who told him not to shoot his mouth off. If only he had kept up with his long-term girlfriend and wasn’t such a partier, which she repeatedly told him she hated. If only . . . If only . . .
Father Paul once told him to avoid the if onlys and what ifs. “They both go nowhere,” he said. It was still hard for Mark to avoid going nowhere though, and it bothered him that he was bothered.
Mark maneuvered the lawnmower to the top of the hill, near the abbey church and guest house, when he heard it loudly grind some gravel from the parking lot that found its way into the grass. A loud ping rang out as the lawnmower’s blades shot a stone into the side of a car parked in the lot.
“Goddammit!” he shouted. He shook his head in disgust, hoping no one had seen it.
“Nice shot!” shouted Father Paul, from under the church portico.
Great. Mark turned off the engine. The big mower slowed to a rumble and was then silent. He climbed down.
“How’s the director of the physical plant today?” asked Father Paul, as he strode across the lawn. Grass clippings clung to the bottom of his black-and-white Trappist habit.
“Shitty,” Mark said.
Paul’s pursed his lips, which Mark took as disapproval of his language.
“What’s going on?” asked the abbot.
“Oh, just a lot of bullshit. You know, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here sometimes.”
“Well, right now, I think you’re mowing the lawn.”
Mark didn’t know if that was supposed to be funny or profound. It struck him as neither. And it only made him angrier.
“Oh, Christ,” he sighed.
“You know,” said Paul, frowning. “I’m not a big fan of language like that . . .”
Mark’s face fell. “Yes, I know. I’m sorry. I, um . . .”
“What’s going on?”
Mark took a deep breath and tried to remind himself that Paul usually gave good advice. “How long do you have?”
“I’ve got a meeting at the jam factory in a few minutes, but until then I’m all yours.”
“I did something stupid,” he said, closing his eyes and shaking his head. “The other day I made a pass at someone, and she turned me down. I don’t know why, but it makes me really pissed off, and frankly it makes me question what I’m doing with my life.”
“That’s a big leap—going from one woman not responding to you to questioning your whole life.”
Mark looked past Paul’s shoulder and into a dark mass of pine trees. “Yeah, I know. It’s not that. Well, it is. I don’t know. I guess I’m not sure how I got to where I am.”
Mark wondered if he should share all this with Paul, and then realized that he couldn’t keep it in and that he might not get another chance. He couldn’t talk about this with Dave.
“I mean, I’ve got an architectural degree, and I’m really grateful for the job here, Father Paul, don’t get me wrong, and I’m sorry for that language, but I wish I were more settled, and more, well, wealthy or however you want to say it, and I really want to be married to a woman I love. I know you’ll tell me that that’s greedy or something. Is that wrong to want that?”
“No,” said Paul. “It’s very right. I’m glad you like it here. You’re good at what you do, you know. We’re grateful for your presence. But it’s okay to want something else.”
“I know this will sound strange and, you know, maybe it’s the thing with . . .” He started to say her name, but decided against it. “With this woman who’s got me down . . . but I feel like I’m, I don’t know, sort of embarrassed by what I’m doing here. You know? I get frustrated when that kind of stuff happens, and it ends up confusing me about other things. I have these other friends, and things are going really great for them, like this one friend, and here I am . . .”
Mark looked at the grass. Suddenly he found his throat constricting with emotion, and tears begin to fill his eyes, which surprised him, but mostly made him even angrier.
“Here I am mowing lawns. It’s like this job is just . . . a handyman, and I wonder if I’m . . .”
“If you’re what?”
“I wonder if I’m going to be stuck here mowing lawns and being a goddamn handyman my whole life. Frankly, I don’t even know what I feel right now. I’m just pissed off. Everything seems to suck right now.”
“Do you mind some advice?”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, first try to separate the strands of what’s bothering you and not jumble it all together,” said Paul. “Just because a relationship with this woman didn’t pan out doesn’t mean that your whole life is a mess. You might try to avoid using such universal terms, such as ‘Everything sucks.’”
“I know,” said Mark, looking down at the grass clippings on his beat-up sneakers. Seeing his old shoes suddenly made him feel poor. And embarrassed. “You’ve told me that before, and I try not to do that. I think I’m more upset about my job. It doesn’t feel like I
’m where I should be. Sometimes it feels . . .” Mark wiped the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his faded T-shirt. As he did that he also wiped the tears from his eyes, which he didn’t want Paul to see.
“It feels . . . beneath me.” Mark was embarrassed even as he said it.
“I know I’ve told you that Jesus was a carpenter, but did I ever talk about the other stuff that Jesus probably did? The word that the Gospel writers used for Jesus’s occupation is tekton.”
“I’m sorry, what?” said Mark, looking directly at Paul. Was he going to get a sermon now?
“Tekton,” said Paul. “That’s the Greek word that the Gospels use for Jesus’s occupation. Most people think that Jesus was a carpenter, but a lot of scholars say that word means not just carpenter, but woodworker, or craftsman, or handyman, or construction worker, or even day laborer. Jesus would have done a lot more than just building doors and tables. He probably helped to build houses and stone walls and all that.” Paul smiled. “If he were on earth today, he might even be driving a lawnmower.”
“If I were Jesus I’d snap my fingers, and this lawn would be mowed.”
“Maybe you would. But maybe you wouldn’t. Jesus really worked. I mean, when he was in Nazareth he didn’t just snap his fingers and make a table. He built it. The people around him in Nazareth knew him mostly not as a miracle worker, but as a carpenter. I’ll bet he was pretty good at what he did too. And I doubt that he had much choice about it. St. Joseph already had a carpentry business, so Jesus probably had go into the family business and follow in Joseph’s footsteps. But you have a choice, Mark.”
“I know,” said Mark, who kicked a stone off the lawn, away from the path of the mower. “I just don’t seem to be making the right ones.”
“So what’s your choice?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what do you really want to do in life?”
Mark took in a long breath and let it out. He briefly looked at Paul, and then he looked at the clean lines of the abbey church and the way it sat perfectly on top of the hill, as if the place was made for the building and the building made for the place. He remembered reading that Frank Lloyd Wright was insistent, almost obsessively insistent, that a building appear as if it grew from the surrounding countryside. He looked at the church’s red wooden door and the pine benches that sat on the portico under the stone arches. Then he remembered those bookcases on the Cape.
“If I could be a good carpenter,” he said, “I would be one.”
“Why?”
“When I was in school, what I enjoyed most was making all those little models, which everyone else seemed to hate. All the other crap seemed silly to me—all the surface stuff about which architect was hot, and which architectural firm was the most cutting-edge, who was winning all the big architectural prizes, and blah, blah, blah. What I liked most was the building, the doing, the making, you know? Halfway through school I started to wonder if carpentry wasn’t what I was made for. Man, I once made these bookshelves for this amazing house on the Cape, and I couldn’t stop looking at them.”
Mark looked at Paul and said, “I like creating something, you know? It feels good. That’s the best I can explain it. But I’m not sure if that’s a life.”
“It’s what you enjoy,” said Paul. “What’s wrong with that? Why not do what you enjoy? And who cares what everyone else is doing? Why not let all the surface stuff, as you call it, just fade away? Why not let go of all the comparisons and all the expectations about what’s supposedly beneath you? Frankly, that’s what we try to do here—strip things away so that we can be who we’re called to be. It’s like scraping off an old coat of paint from a table, so you can see the original wood. And usually what’s underneath is more beautiful than we ever imagined.”
Mark was still angry about making a pass at Anne, but this conversation had helped him cool down and shift perspective. He could feel his breathing slow down and muscles unclench, there in the breeze on the half-mowed lawn. Less embarrassed now, he pulled up the hem of his T-shirt and wiped his eyes.
“Why don’t you let me see if we can give you the chance to do more carpentry work or other work that’s a little more creative here?” said the abbot.
“Wow. That’s really nice.” He felt the need to shake Paul’s hand, so he did.
“I hope you can see that your desire to be a carpenter may come from God. It may be a vocation for you. You’re good at it. And in this case you can make a living doing what you love. So why not trust your desire?”
“Thanks,” he said. He climbed back onto the lawnmower, switched on the ignition, and said, “Any advice about women?”
“Well,” said Paul, crossing his arms, “you know what Jesus said.”
“No!” said Mark, curious to hear dating advice from Jesus. Loudly, the lawnmower rumbled to life.
“There are plenty of fish in the sea!” said Paul over the noise of the engine.
“Jesus didn’t say that!” said Mark over the now deafening roar.
“No!” said Paul, shouting at the top of his lungs. “But he should have!”
24
As Anne washed her dishes after a dinner of leftover salmon from a night out with Kerry, she thought about her prayer in the chapel from a few days before: “Are you there, God? It’s me, Annie.” It surprised her that she said the name that Father Edward still used, as if she were returning to a place she had once known or a person she had once been.
She looked over her shoulder at the photo of her baptism. The photo that Father Edward gave her was posted on the white refrigerator door, held there by the Phillies magnet. She remembered Jeremiah’s own baptism, which was done grudgingly, out of respect for her parents, in what was supposedly her parish church, though she had never before set foot inside. “What’s your parish?” her mother asked a few days after Jeremiah’s birth and received a blank stare in response. Eddie was noncommittal. “Doesn’t bother me if the priest splashes him with some water,” he said when the topic was raised.
During Jeremiah’s funeral, however, there came a moment when Anne was grateful that he had been baptized. The day before the funeral, she met with a priest at the local parish. The kind young Nigerian-born priest talked at length to her, but she forgot almost everything he said, because she could barely concentrate. But one comment made an impression.
“We place a cloth over his casket after it comes into the church,” he said in heavily accented English, as they sat in a parlor crowded with heavy furniture. “Do you know what this symbolizes?” he asked.
She shook her head, unable to follow the conversation, so submerged was she in grief.
“It is called a pall,” he said.
Anne was amazed that she hadn’t known the derivation of the familiar word. A pall was cast over him, she thought. An avid reader, she must have come upon variations on that phrase dozens of times in novels. The pall represented the white clothes that infants wore at baptism. She wasn’t sure she remembered the priest accurately, and the cloth that the funeral home used was almost as big as a tablecloth. But the symbolism made an impression on her. Anne wept hardest when the funeral director draped the long white cloth atop Jeremiah’s casket after it was carried into the church by the pallbearers, another term she now understood. So at Jeremiah’s funeral she thought about his baptism.
Her prayer the other night in the abbey chapel had confused her. She enjoyed it, but she wondered if it was even prayer. Once she introduced herself to God, she waited. And waited some more. What was supposed to happen? Was she supposed to say something else? Was she supposed to hear voices? She wished Father Paul were there to help her.
So she just sat with her eyes closed. It was so dark in the chapel that she couldn’t see the image of Mary she liked, but she figured that closing her eyes was the right way to pray.
Almost immediately she thought about all the things she had to do over the next few days, and she felt her pulse quicken and her face flush. The audit that
she and Kerry were working on was more complicated than either of them anticipated when they started the project. The client’s financial records were a mess. She squeezed her eyes shut and grimaced.
Oh, to have more free time! Ora et labora? Isn’t that what Maddy said the monks did? Was that “prayer and work”? Or was it “rest and work”? Either way, she longed for more rest in her life. But what would she do with free time? Spend more of it thinking about Jeremiah? Maybe it was better to work harder, to keep her mind off the past. Then again, with a little more free time, she could work in the garden . . .
Then she recalled the image of God as the gardener, the one she had talked with Paul about. He said it was a good image, so she decided it was okay to think about that.
Anne remembered the day in her backyard, when she knelt on the edge of the garden and had noticed the intense colors of the flowers. The reds and pinks and oranges came to her mind. The warmth of the sun on her neck. Her hands in the moist dirt. She pictured herself back in the garden now. She felt that calm again, and she relaxed. Comfort seemed to take root in her.
Then something strange happened. She wasn’t sure if it was something she made up, but into her head, naturally and unexpectedly, came an image of Jesus walking in a garden.
Years ago, her Sunday school teacher had taught her class the song “Morning Has Broken.” She remembered the sound of the roomful of students enthusiastically singing with their teacher. And there was one line of the song she liked especially. She still remembered it word for word: “Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden, sprung in completeness where his feet pass.” As a girl, Anne liked to think about Jesus walking over dry land and leaving flowers in his footprints. She knew it probably didn’t happen like that, but that’s what she remembered as she sat in the chapel.
She enjoyed thinking about that image, and in her mind’s eye could picture the orange and yellow marigolds left in Jesus’s footprints. The colors were so bright, she could almost taste them: fresh orange juice and a lemon candy drop.