The Carpenter

I remember, said his mother, when he was just five, watching his father work, asking, Daddy, what happened to that chair? and Joseph said, People treated it badly and broke it, son, and he started crying and said Daddy it shouldn’t be broken, how can we fix it? and his daddy said hammer and nails, son, hammer and nails. And it didn’t make sense until he saw it happen. How can hitting it, driving spikes into it, fix it? Surely that could only break it more. But then he saw the chair when it was finished, and it made sense.

 When he became a man, he saw how the world is, and he wept, and asked the Father Daddy, what happened? How could they break themselves? They shouldn't BE broken! How can I fix it? And when he came back from the desert he said he’d heard the answer, hammer and nails, son, hammer and nails. And the day he found the hammer and nails to do it, it didn’t make sense to me. It only seemed to me that the world was now broken utterly. But now I see the people who met him when they were broken, and I see how they look now…. And it makes sense.

 

© John M. Munzer