"There are 33 cardinals in the tree outside my room," she shouted to me from downstairs. And there were. The tree was like a bird waiting room.
Yesterday was the snowiest day of them all. The snow fell in piles, piles so deep they coerced my car to get stuck in the driveway so I couldn't drive to work.
Stuck or not stuck, the snow wouldn't hide its beauty, and the cardinals were celebrating it. All 33 of them were chattering, fluttering, twittering as they took turns at the feed.
This little joint, this lock, this coming together of things. Two molded into one with effort-packed precision. Different planks entirely, different colors, different grains...different families of wood even. But they come together to make the box. The jewelry box. The box that holds the treasure...the goodness...the truth.
No dovetail, no box. No dovetail, just two pieces of wood, as far apart as they ever were. Two pieces of wood, cut and carved, shaved and sanded down by the Craftsman. All the hard sanding down. It seems sometimes like the sanding down is all that happens. But then, the one piece is pushed against and then into and then with the other. It sinks in that the sanding was shaping.
The dove...tail. Is it the dove or the tail that is more descriptive? For the wood, it seems to be the tail, but for the rest of things, it must only be the dove.
"It's one degree outside." That's what I just overheard. It's a good preface, I think.
Over the weekend Tim and I braved the wintery bluster to enjoy the splendor of what I like to call "retail paradise," (sung to the tune of Gangsta's Paradise, or Amish Paradish, depending on how you look at it).
We encountered one particularly clean mall bathroom, which is not easy to come by. I could literally see my reflection in the faucet. I walked out to find a man next to a cleaning cart. "I don't know who cleans these bathrooms," I said, "but they are unexceptionally shiny."
"It was me. That's my job." He took just as much pride in cleaning the public restrooms as an artist would at a masterpiece.
We gravitate towards pizza as well, and we discovered a new gem, Pizza Cucinova, where we met another man genuinely convinced of the goodness of the pizza whose dough he was sinking his fingers into. "You'll see. I've never met someone who didn't love it." And we saw, and tasted for that matter, every little bit of goodness tucked into the folds of the prociutto and mozzarella.
Today Tim had a surprise snow day. He brought a picnic snow lunch to work and we took a sneak-a-hike. It was a treasure, buried right there in my lunch hour.
This weekend was full of many moments that revealed truth. True joy, true sacrifice in love, true family, true imitations of Michael Jackson...
The celebrations of the weekend filled me with a unique joy. I was impacted by these men, these friars who "helped raise" Adam, in his words. They're authentically meek, authentically masculine, authentically living their lives for Christ. It was impossible to be in their midst - watching football, drinking Breckenridge Christmas Ale, playing Banana Grams, dancing all night long, without realizing that Jesus is the source of all true joy.
Thank you, Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, for redefining celebration.
