Jesus the carpenter Story
From the earliest memories of my childhood, ‘home’ was a place filled with the noises of my father’s work. When I was playing in the yard outside his workshop, or sitting with the other children and the women, they were always there in the background: my father, his brothers and my cousin. There were comings and goings: deliveries; collections; customers come to haggle and dispute and seek better work at a lower cost (though they always accepted my father’s price in the end, because they knew that he was fair and that the work could not be bettered). My uncles and cousins would go off to work elsewhere, to deliver beams and frames to a site or price-up a new job, but my father would always stay with the workshop. My family’s reputation was guaranteed by his personal oversight of the work. Not one piece of wood left our home that he himself had not touched.
Sometimes, when he was alone in the workshop, I would try to get closer, to watch him through the open doorway. I knew I could not cross the threshold: this I had learned before I knew how to recognize a scorpion or stay clear of the rear end of a donkey. The workshop was not a place for children. There were tools and dangers, and there was work to be done. Even my mother, though this rule did not apply to her, stayed away. The day we went in together to collect and tidy my dead father’s tools was the first time I had ever seen her in that hallowed place.
I watched my father from a distance, waiting for the moments when the sun would send shafts of light through the window to illuminate the movements of his hands over the wood.
When I was seven years old, something changed. My father began, from time to time, to catch my eye as I watched, and even to smile as he worked. The exclusion zone around the workshop’s door seemed to be shrinking, and I dared to move a little closer. And then a day came when he spoke the most wonderful words to me. Putting down the tools he had been working with, he looked directly at me and said “Do you want to help?”
I hesitated, unsure if I had heard him well, but he kept eye contact and beckoned for me to cross threshold of his world. “One day this will be your work, not mine”, he said, “It’s time you began your learning.”
I stepped forward nervously, as he returned to his work. He fell into a pattern of working for a few moments, then stopping to explain what he was doing; telling me the names of the tools and what they were for. He was finishing a short beam that he told me would serve as a lintel, to anchor the frame of a doorway. But this was no ordinary doorway – it would stand in the new home of Matthias the Priest, one of the richest and most important men in our town. This would be a lintel people talked about.
He was working the wood, smoothing it and from time to time pouring oil onto its surface and rubbing it in. Then he urged me to come closer still. Taking a piece of untreated wood from the floor, he put it onto the work table beside the lintel he had been working on.
“I want to show you something”, he said, “Close your eyes”. I shut my eyes tight, and sensed his body moving closer to mine. He took my hands in his and placed them on the wood he had lifted from the floor. “Feel this”, he said, “Do you feel how it is rough, un-worked?”
I moved my fingers carefully, wary of splinters. I nodded.
“Now feel this”, he said, lifting my hands onto the lintel he had been finishing, “Do you feel the difference?”
I did. There was a silky residue of the oil – but even without this, the beam was smooth to the touch, and warm. I trailed my hands across the contours of the wood, feeling every tiny swirl and groove. It was like mapping the world, following the hills and valleys; finding the pathways. But this was a world that had been washed by rain and shaped by wind until every contour surrendered smoothly to the next. It was as if the wood had a fingerprint – the markings were as subtle, and as unique. Someone would be paying a high price for the care and effort my father had put into preparing this beam: but years from now, decades even, they would still be grateful for his work.
“It’s not enough to see the difference”, my father said, “I want you to feel it. You must learn to read the wood: to know it so well that you alone can say when it is finished. And when you’ve grown used to feeling it in your fingers, you will feel it in your heart. Only then can you be sure that the work you do is as good as it can possibly be.”
And in that moment my education began. I spent every hour I could beside my father, and he began to trust me for simple tasks – choosing the raw beam that would form the next lintel; measuring off the cuts by the stretch of my hand; fetching and tidying the necessary tools. On my eighth birthday I was told that I would no longer be required to help my mother with tasks around the house, but would work with my father for a few hours every day. And so I learned as we worked together, and my father poured into me the skills and knowledge it had taken him a lifetime to acquire. Years later, when the palsy had begun to twist his hands, and his breath was coming in shorter and shorter gasps, I was able to take the load from him. Silently, without a word spoken, the apprentice became the master. Before I knew it, it was he who was watching me work. And then he was gone.
And even when my career changed, and I left the workshop behind forever, I still worked from the lessons I had learned at my father’s side. People are not unlike trees: they too have unique and subtle markings. You have to read them, to know when your work is done. My father would never know what a task it was he had prepared me for. And for the rest of my life, whenever I experienced the press of wood against my skin, I thought of him, and remembered the patience with which he had loved and taught me.
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