By “form,” [the Platonists] mean that Exemplar and Idea which was in the mind of God, and according to whose likeness the world was afterward made.
— Hugh of St. Victor, Saxon theologian, 12th century
Our garage has become a jungle. Workbenches, power tools, measuring instruments, hand tools, sandpaper and cardboard boxes spread out wantonly, taking up space where a car would like to be. Where my wife, Elizabeth, would like the car to be. The clutter of human-made items competes for space with a forest of wood planks from many tree species — oak, maple, poplar, yew, mulberry, pine, sycamore, cedar and a thick slab of black walnut. Snakes could live in there unbothered. A chipmunk already does. He darts in or out when I open the garage door.
I’ve become an amateur woodworker during retirement and have gone all in. Unfortunately, my novice skills are only as well-formed as the garage is organized; that is, not well at all. Even so, I undertake to learn and improve those skills as part of my life’s unfinished soul-crafting and to smoothen the waney edges of a life still incomplete.
I began woodworking in earnest out of necessity: I had 37 boxes of books arriving from my University office in less than a month. I needed space to house them. I wanted built-in, not freestanding, bookcases of solid red oak — a retirement gift to myself.
I have been captivated by the intricate grain lines in wood since I was a child but had only tinkered with woodworking. I had built simple pine bookcases using a handsaw, hammer, nails and wood glue. I still have some of those rudimentary cases. They shelve long-unused books in our basement: college textbooks; a 1972 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; 20 years of National Geographic; field identification guides such as Trees of North America and Birds of North America; children’s books covering numerous topics — volcanoes, dinosaurs, ocean life, forests — and even the complete 1920 edition of McGuffey Readers. I was intent on building better cases but had to learn, at a ripe age, how to construct them. I lacked the basic skills of handiwork and repair, including carpentry.
At age 70, I discovered just what is required to become a master craftsman: 10,000 hours of disciplined training. Ten. Thousand. Hours. That’s according to sociologist Richard Sennett, author of The Craftsman. If I worked at it full time, 40 hours a week, learning the tools and techniques of the trade, I’d accumulate 2,080 hours of training a year. In five years I’d be a master. At half time, 10 years. At quarter time — more realistic — 20. The numbers seemed forbidding. I’d be an octogenarian or nonagenarian by the time I became a master, and by then I might have too little mental and physical stamina to cut straight lines in wood or operate power tools. But I’d do what I could, even if I had to settle for less.
By woodworking, I mean primarily furniture-making, but also some artwork that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to hang on my wall, even if only in the basement. When you work with the interior of a tree, you discover beauty you had not known was there: colors, shapes, lines and contrasting forms of startling and elegant character that no one has seen before. No one has known that particular beauty was there, except, maybe, the Mind of God. And beauty wants to be seen by attentive eyes. See this? it says. Give it shape. Show it to others. The work is contemplative. “Contemplate,” per Merriam-Webster: “to view or consider with continued attention”; to meditate on the splendor that lives “deep down things,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins expressed it. Things reveal themselves if we’re attentive; they surprise, perhaps even seize us with beauty. Then we attempt to show them as they were revealed, and as we re-create and transform them into something else. Like art. Or furniture.
Before I could take over the garage for a woodshop, I had to clear out boxes that had cluttered its back wall and corners ever since we moved into the house 25 years earlier. We’d long forgotten what was in them and had gotten along fine without it. I set a lawn chair — faded and cracked — near the garage opening, where I could sit, beer in hand, and ponder life’s mysteries during occasional breaks from slicing and manipulating wood.
I had to acquire skills quickly, without a well-provisioned workshop. I built rudimentary workbenches from scrap wood. I needed tools — hand and power — and had to decide which ones, from a multitude of manufacturers, to buy. Then I had to assemble and learn how to use them. Over the course of several months, I bought a table saw, router, band saw, dust collector and power planer. My son-in-law Ben discovered a used miter saw and drill press gathering dust in a storage room at the factory where he works. They were long unused but still in working condition, so they now occupy space in my garage.
I assembled the tools as soon as they arrived, which required following instruction manuals, most of them poorly written — a cruel torture for one who loves well-crafted sentences. Some manuals are as opaque as postmodern academic jargon. The main difference with tool manuals is that, with persistence, you end up with something you can use for good things.
Elizabeth doesn’t mind that I spend money on tools, although it’s a luxury for our budget. She likes seeing me engaged in practical tasks. I’m a man of books and ideas who spends too much time brooding and pondering; she worries about the gloom that often hangs over me. When I’m animated by woodworking — like when observing how wood stain or linseed oil bring out the full beauty of wood grain, or when I demonstrate a technique I’ve just learned — she’s pleased to see the spark in my eye. She, too, is a sharer of things-to-be-marveled-at: bluebird and raven feathers, flowers that emerge unexpectedly from our compost heap, the new species of bird — indigo bunting — that has begun visiting our backyard feeders. “Come and see,” she says to me.
Competence in manual skills, along with furniture-making, was at the heart of this journey into craftsmanship. A child ought to learn practical skills early in life, but I hadn’t. I gravitated to academic and intellectual work. I found myself, in elderhood, not one-dimensional, but not multidimensional either. I was determined to pilgrimage my way through the stages of soul-craft that I’d neglected until now.
Woodcraft, like all manual trades, is “soul work,” says philosopher Matthew Crawford in his 2009 book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. It builds character and competence. It animates the soul. In my case, it allows the mind — even when focused on a specific task — to float into the realm of philosophical and theological reverie. For example, my religious tradition sees the proper goal of human activity as a participation in the life of God. Creative activity is — or should be — a participation in the work of the Cosmos-in-Process, that is, in cosmic evolution. Physical action toward a spiritual end. Hands and mind working in union through the urging of Spirit. Ora et labora, according to St. Benedict, the sixth-century founder of communal monasticism. Labor and prayer; prayer and labor. The universe, I like to think, is God’s ongoing artistic creation, still in progress, and we get to attentively participate in some of the creating. Such ideas float around in my mind as I work the wood and marvel at its intricate grainlines.
I thought the bookcases would be easy to complete; maybe a week for each. I bought oak boards at the lumber yard. I needed only to route grooves, dadoes and rabbets in them; cut them to final size so they’d fit precisely in the wall recesses; sand, stain, varnish and then assemble them. A simple enough task, I assumed — wrongly. First, I had to tear out a clothing closet in my younger son’s former bedroom to accommodate a built-in bookcase, in what would become my home study. Ceiling to floor, eight feet wide, 30 inches deep. I designed a foundation for it using two-by-fours attached to the floor. Later, I ripped out the material in the recesses on each side of the limestone chimney in our living room: mirrors, lathe and plaster, metal planter boxes filled with soil and charcoal, and recessed grow lights — an early 1950s design. There I constructed two more built-in bookcases.
Even a simple task is a challenge if you don’t yet have the tools, don’t know how to use them well, or aren’t familiar with the concepts behind woodcraft jargon. “Kerf,” for example, is the thickness of the blade on a table saw, and it’s one-eighth of an inch. When you measure a board and mark the spot where you intend to cut with a pencil line, you have to take the kerf into account when sawing. If you cut through the middle of the line, each piece will be one-sixteenth of an inch short. Join a number of such boards and you end up with a noticeable gap at one edge. Then you must either start over from scratch or conceal the gap with a thin strip of wood trim. As a novice, I became a master of concealment.
Grooves carved into the wood have specialized names: “groove” itself refers to a cut in the direction of the grain; a dado is a groove cut across the grain of the wood; a rabbet is a groove along the edge of a board. A thin slice of a branch or stump cut crosswise is a cookie. If you cut with the length of the grain, that’s a rip cut. Table and circular saws have varying numbers of sharp teeth; you want fewer teeth, say 24, for rip cuts, and more, 40 to 80, for cross cuts. You need different blades for each of these.
I labor and struggle with basic tools and techniques. The router, for example, is a powerful, unruly tool used for cutting grooves into wood and for carving designs into wood edges to soften and enhance their look. A good router rotates a sharp-edged, steel-carbide bit at 16,000 to 27,000 times a minute. With two cutters per bit, that’s 32,000 to 54,000 cuts. That power has to be harnessed, fenced in a narrow lane between two sturdy, parallel sides so that the router doesn’t run off track and turn a straight groove into an errant gouge.
One is fortunate if they can apprentice to a master craftsman, but I didn’t have that opportunity. So, I find my teachers through YouTube videos, of which there are many: The Woodworkers Guild of America, Stumpy Nubs, Tamar, Matthew Cremona, IBuildIt.ca and Fix This Build That are just a few of many I rely on. They teach me the basic tools, techniques and jargon of woodcraft, and the hosts are pleasant people to watch and listen to. From them I learn to be a good-enough woodworker, if not a master. One able to create beauty or, better, to help reveal the beauty that’s already in the wood, though as yet unseen by human eyes.
After the bookcases, I move on to maple end tables, the material cut from an old sugar maple in our backyard. The tree once stood 15 feet from the picture window of our dining room; it had wonderfully spaced branches for climbing and leaves that turned glorious colors in autumn. All our children and grandchildren played in it. We raked its leaves every autumn, along with those of its sister trees nearby — hundreds of thousands of them — and piled them high onto large tarps. Once the tarp was full to overflowing, the children jumped into the piles and disappeared momentarily as they sank into the leaves. We then dragged the tarp to the edge of the street, children aboard, squealing with glee. After the kids got off, we dumped the leaves where the lawn-waste truck vacuumed them up for deposit in the city’s compost site. In early spring, the children watched with pleasure as the maple’s helicopter seeds fluttered and twirled, trying to catch some before they reached the ground. Some of the seedlings escaped our lawn mower, and we transplanted the strong sprouts to a suitable spot in the yard so they could grow up and take the place of the old ones once they died.
All things age and die, however. Large branches of the sugar maple began to drop unprovoked, one onto our roof. We had to take the tree down. Well over 120 years old, it was rotten through most of its trunk. I wanted some of that wood for my furniture projects, but the arborist told me it was unusable for woodworking. He stuck the point of a knife into the wood and picked away at it, showing me how spongy it was. Nonetheless, I made him leave behind several large bolts from the trunk — about two feet thick and three feet in diameter — which I hoped had not yet turned punky. I’m glad I did, because that wood is beautifully spalted.
Spalting occurs when a maple tree begins to die. The xylem and phloem that carry water and nutrients through the tree begin to rot, but not to the extent that it weakens the structural integrity of the wood. Maple is a light-colored hardwood, so its grains don’t “pop” the way, say, an oak’s or a zebrawood’s do. The spalting, however, which is caused by dying fungus, turns those intricate vessels into dark, interweaving lines and shapes of startling beauty, as if they were thin lines of mysterious alien calligraphy. As a result, spalted maple is highly prized and difficult to find. It’s always a guess as to whether the wood has reached just the right stage of rot. If decayed too much, the wood turns pulpy and is good only for the fire pit or compost heap; if not enough, the intricate dark lines won’t have yet appeared. Of course, you can’t know whether the tree is spalted until it is felled and sliced.
I got lucky. Those bolts were crammed with beauty just waiting to be revealed. Singing like a siren, it called to me — me, an unskilled craftsman — to help it out. I am willing. Now that its hidden beauty has been released, how might I serve as a conduit for its self-revelation?
Before transforming the maple into furniture, I had to slice the bolts and large branches into manageable sizes. That required many hours with an electric chain saw, which wasn’t really up to the task. (I no longer had the strength to handle a gas-powered chain saw.) After days of exhausting work, I got the bolts to a size I could take to the band saw for further milling. The work sapped my strength but was richly satisfying all the same. I didn’t have to do this; I wanted to. I could have bought spalted maple at a specialty wood store and spared my back some pain.
Still, when you buy milled wood, someone else has worked it: felled the tree, sawn it into uniform planks and slabs, and planed it smooth into workable pieces. I wouldn’t own it, not fully, and I wanted to own it. Memories of my children and grandchildren were in that tree. I cut those bolts, laboriously, and got to see divine art in its raw state. I hauled the wood to my garage, then stacked and stickered it in layers one inch apart so air could carry away the moisture. I ran oscillating fans daily, leaving the garage door open slightly for fresh air, even in winter. For two years I nursed the moisture out of them, lest the wood continue to shrink and crack after the furniture was made. This was going to be my spirit-mind handiwork, scars, gouges and all, whether I made end tables, yard benches or keepsake boxes for my children and grandchildren. I want to build things that will last, in the time I have left, to leave behind things worthy to pass down through generations. I don’t know how to do that well yet, but I am learning.
One cannot write about woodworking without talking about flaws, both major ones that cause you to throw the wood into the scrap heap and minor ones you can conceal. Matthew Crawford writes, “Give it your best, learn from your mistakes, and the next time get a little closer to the image you started with in your head.” The image you started with in your head. The image is of something perfect, but the thing made has flaws. I want to come as close to perfection as possible, but I will never reach it. One’s technique develops and evolves through mistakes. I settle for some defects; not because I’m satisfied with flawed work, but because my craftsmanship is still an early work-in-progress.
I ponder the discrepancy between the ideal and the real. Does the ideal exist? If so, where? If you closely inspect the work of even a master craftsman, you’ll find some minor defect. Does perfection exist, I wonder, only in the Mind which conceived the universe? Even the universe, intuition tells me, is still an imperfect work-in-progress. But if God — the Master Designer and Builder — conceived a perfect cosmos, why are there imperfections in it?
God’s creation imperfect? My reverie is challenged by centuries of theological history, including the monk Thomas Merton, whose New Seeds of Contemplation is now shelved in my new bookcase to the left of the limestone chimney: “Do you imagine,” Merton asks, “that . . . created things . . . are imperfect attempts at reproducing an ideal type which the Creator never quite [perfected]? If that is so, you do not give Him glory but proclaim that He is not a perfect Creator.”
I get what Merton means. He’s talking a kind of Christian Neoplatonism here. The created world, in this view, is a perfect image of the Original Idea in God’s Mind at the beginning. I disagree. Creation is imperfect — not because God is imperfect, nor because his Idea for the cosmos is flawed — but because creation is not yet complete. It’s a 14-billion-year work-in-progress, and it’s far from done. It evolves, creatively and chaotically, yet is ultimately ordered and sublimely fine-tuned to some end.
I continue musing.
Cosmos. Universe. They’re not synonymous. Cosmos: a well-ordered whole of everything that exists: time, space, matter, energy, mind. Universe: everything that exists — time, space, matter, energy, mind — but only partially ordered. Glitches remain. Stars explode, galaxies collide, asteroids bombard a living planet and extinguish most life forms. Woes, both cosmic and local, visit everywhere: earthquakes, volcanoes, ice ages, continental drift. The universe doesn’t seem that friendly or well-crafted a place. It’s ripped, gouged, deformed, blasted and scarred. Its massive black holes really suck. Yet, it evolves. It goes somewhere. My woodworking journey, I like to think, fits into a broader scheme that is sublated by the journey of the spirit into God. Sublate: to assimilate and integrate a smaller entity or endeavor into a larger, more comprehensive whole.
My bookcases don’t match the original idea I started with. The universe doesn’t match the original idea God started with, either. Not yet. Maybe the universe is still learning the craft of becoming a cosmos, an apprentice to God’s Original Idea. I hope so. Maybe when it becomes a journeyman universe, galaxies will stop colliding into each other and stay in their own lane. Dare I think we can be its apprentices and journeymen, too, helping it along in our tiny corner of infinite space?
It deepens my hope to think so; at least, it helps me through another cursed day of cutting a winsome piece of wood untrue. I like living in this kind of universe; it’s going somewhere amidst the chaos and destruction. It gives me hope that the greatest perils we now face will be but momentary blips in the overall scheme of things.
Back at the workbench I practice making joints: box joints, dovetails, tongue and groove, mortise and tenon, pocket-hole. I’ve learned to practice and experiment on a sample before using a technique new to me on the final work.
God experiments, too, tries out all forms and possibilities, gives things freedom as well as direction, tolerates mistakes, rebuilds, perfects slowly. He slow-cooks the universe, adds new ingredients, drains out others; sears, then simmers. Armchair theologian that I am, I ask myself why God is taking so long to create the cosmos. Why the slow simmer? Dreamily, I respond: What’s a multibillion-year process to God, who is timeless, eternal?
Forever. Eternal. They’re not synonymous. Forever: unending or infinite time. Eternal: timelessness, not subject to time. Cosmic time is but a flash in the Mind of God. What are 14 billion years to One who is eternal?
After finishing three end-table tops — spalted maple framed in black walnut — I bring them inside so they’ll acclimate to the indoor temperature and humidity. When I set them against our limestone chimney, I am taken aback: their look against the gray limestone is so startling and fitting that I know instantly their destiny is not to be end tables but wall art. I hang them above the fireplace.
Next, I make a walnut keepsake box for my oldest granddaughter’s 9th birthday, a project which has some urgency. It is the first such box I will make (the YouTube guys show me how), and I so want it to be just right. But I become unsettled as the project nears completion, due to a measuring flaw. The box is constructed of black walnut with spalted-maple inlays on the lid and the front face. As a whole and in its parts — sides, lid, bottom and inlays — the box would form golden rectangles, a common feature in art and architecture. The height and width of a golden rectangle follows a ratio of 1 to 1.618, which is considered the proportion most pleasing to the human eye. The front of the Parthenon embodies it. Michelangelo used more than 20 golden rectangles within which he painted sections of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I want my granddaughter’s keepsake box to exhibit that ratio, too. I measure and cut carefully to obtain the exact dimensions for each piece of wood. The spalted-maple inlays, according to the image in my head, will also form golden rectangles; hence, a golden rectangle of spalted maple within a golden rectangle of black walnut. That requires some basic geometrical calculations . . . and I screw it up.
I get the lid-insert just right, but not the front face. The carved-out depression forms a rectangle, but not a golden one. Crud! I hate geometry! The insert doesn’t match the idea in my head. This setback forces a decision: either I make another box front and re-cut the insert, or I settle for a somewhat ungainly but still good-enough inlay. Unfortunately, I have used the last piece of walnut, and the birthday is coming soon. I settle for good-enough. Elizabeth assures me that our granddaughter will love it, no matter what, that she won’t even notice the flaw.
Well, then, OK.
I return to the world of time and sit in the lawn chair at the opening of the garage. I muse, as I often do, on the relation between science and mystical experience, as well as on the defects in both the natural world and our spiritual lives as they evolve and journey toward perfection.
The discoveries of science lift us into the macro- and microrealms of creation, where we are overcome with wonder. Yet, most scientists do not believe the universe is going anywhere. It has no direction, no telos, they say. Everything happens through random chance and is governed by natural laws. Scientists study finite realms of the natural world. They demur, or refuse to go beyond that finite realm, because if they did go there, they’d be in the domain of metaphysics and theology. But even if they insist, as a matter of scientific principle, on limiting themselves to the finite world, let us acknowledge that the finite world they discover is a vast and beautiful finitude, pregnant with possibility and promise. Let’s give thanks for scientific discovery, for the wonder and curiosity that drive scientists and for the understanding of the universe they uncover. In my musings, which do not demur from passing beyond the natural world, I realize intuitively that the finite world, when examined with spiritual contemplation, bears in its womb the infinite.
In the new living room bookcases, I honor the books that have most influenced me: the history of universities, medieval and modern; works of literature, philosophy and theology: the Bible, the Tao Te Ching, the Upanishads; Augustine, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas; Meister Eckhart, Emerson and Teilhard de Chardin. Plato and Aristotle. Even Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, despite its abstruseness, gets a place at the hearth, as does a volume titled The Essentials of Woodworking. I like to show off my collection. It’s a kind of mirror of who I am, or at least who I wish I were: Scholar? Philosopher? Seeker? Dilettante? Pretender? A bit of each?
When I work with wood, the writers of these books lounge in the back of my mind. Not infrequently, they glide into the forefront and suggest directions for my musings. Then the wood, the tree it came from, our backyard, my woodshop and the artwork I crafted from the tree become sublated — taken up into a dreamy, impressionistic and cosmic whole, without diminishing the unique and singular things they are.
As I plane and sand the maple and the sycamore, the mulberry and the yew, I grapple with the discrepancy between the original concept and the flawed outcome, between ideal and real, between good-enough and not-good-enough. The struggle is worthwhile. It frees my imagination to dream of building the perfect bookcase, one made of all tree species — a bookcase that will hold all the books: the ones read and reread, the seldom-read and the not-yet read; the ones not yet written but that will be, before the end of time, when all authors’ works will be read and known, their ideas sublated into One Sparkling Whole in full communion with the Mind of God.
Ken Garcia retired in 2020 as associate director of Notre Dame’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts. He is the award-winning author of Academic Freedom and the Telos of the Catholic University and Pilgrim River: A Spiritual Memoir.