Canter Bridge

An airplane seat is one of the loneliest places on earth. Tonight, in the dark skies that lead towards Central America, that’s a very good thing.

Loneliness is under-rated. This blurry world wants to fill my every mental space with an advertisement and to turn me into an interpersonal ATM, dispensing smiles, advice, and problem resolution to anyone who pushes the buttons. In contrast, the pleasant anonymity of murmured airplane conversation all around me provides the perfect setting for a bit of loneliness.

By my calculations, roughly eighty per cent of us who professionally carry out some form of Christian ministry are introverts cast in a public role. Not dressed up, and everywhere to go. We find it easy to love people and we rise to the unruly fascination they bring to our tame little lives. But we simply must escape them to recharge. Failing that, we become cracked and dried on the inside, unable to remember who we are, what we believe, or why we once felt strongly about anything, anyone.

Loneliness and the company of a wise friend, for our Corps of Introverts, are both privileges worth pursuing. Perhaps not only for us. The speed of our lives makes it difficult to finish a thought, much less to cultivate the discipline of doing so. We need to find the space to think things through and to cultivate those friendships which lead to conclusion.

The man who built our house loved people, adored God, and reveled in the beauty of wood. Having spent much of his adult life on horseback in the Costa Rican jungle, he never grew tired of describing the hardwoods that once filled the forests of this country’s lowlands. ‘Harry and I brought that wood up in his Toyota’, he says of our front door. ‘I think there’s still a piece of it in your shed out back’.

In his memory, a piece of wood has a history. It evokes names and tales of sweaty cameraderie. A bookshelf done in Cocobola dated to ‘before Wilton died’. A tabletop comes from a venerable tree ‘back behind Venado’. Wood for Bill is not a commodity. It is a wonder. People like that struggle to imagine how kids can grow up healthy ‘now that you can hardly find eight inches of Guayacán.’

Bill never knew Francisco, a wood-worker of uncommon skill. If they had ever met, they would have passed the afternoon talking about hardwoods and their respective charms. In his little shop along the road into Sarchí, Francisco seems never to work regular hours. Whenever I stop off to chat and see how his bananas are growing, he’s sitting on a bench out front. Yet somehow bookshelves, beds, and cabinets emerge from under his loving care with regular—if relaxed—predictability.

When you take a project to Francisco, you sketch out an idea and lean on a table while he pads his shirt pockets in search of his spectacles. Then, with a poignant ‘Uh-huh … Uh-huh…’, Francisco begins to absorb your idea, to imagine it in wood, to see a tree becoming the idea scratched out in pencil on the paper between you. It is a marvel, this transformation of tree into beautiful furniture that happens in Francisco’s shop, while you tick off the weeks and wait for his phone call that announces he’s done it again. One Saturday morning, as Francisco and I lowered a bureau off a truck and into my driveway, I said in awe, ‘Francisco, I have no idea how you do this. This is God’s work!’

He looked at me with a wide smile, his eyes taking me in like a patient master with a frighteningly slow pupil who had finally begun to show some promise. ‘Of course it is …’, he remarked, letting me know without saying so that it had taken me a painfully long time to come to the point.

Today, outside his shop on the road into Sarchí, Francisco looks at the weather-beaten piece of wood I have brought him for the third time. It was one of Bill’s favorite treasures, abandoned to the rain by renters for four years while we were away. In the center of this exceptionally heavy legacy of some low-land hardwood, a hole has rotted clear though. Still, when you brush away the weather’s damage, you can see the dark swirl of its gorgeous grain and imagine it becoming another of Francisco’s marvels.

‘Francisco’, I say with due solemnity, ‘are you sure there’s nothing you can do with this wood. I don’t care how much or how little of it you can use. I just want some part of it to become something. I can’t bear to throw it out.’

We’ve been through this before, Francisco and I. Each time he has told me to let it go. Now, he decides, it is time to finish this thought, to lead this poor gringo to a conclusion. Leaving our inspections in the back of my truck, Francisco eases himself into a bench in front of his shop. I join him to hear his verdict.

‘My father-in-law died a few months back’, he says, by all appearances veering off the route I had anticipated our conversation might follow. ‘We inherited his refrigerator.’ Francisco is looking at his shoes, either concentrating or pretending to do so.

‘I had to spend 35,000 colones to get it running’, he says. I understand we are talking about a hundred dollars of hard-earned furniture-shop profits for this country artesan. His tale continues. ‘It ran pretty well for about two weeks, and then it stopped again.’

We have never talked about household appliances, Francisco and I. I have never felt the loss. I wonder how badly I have bored him to set him off on this shop-front discourse. ‘I put another 50,000 colones into it, and it ran again, but not for long’, he offers, this time with a new, appliance-weary tone in his country dialect. He wanders into some modest detail about the inner-workings of old refrigerators.

For the first time, he looks up at me. I could put another 50,000 colones into that blessed refrigerator, and it would probably run for a little while. But it’s a fifteen-year-old refrigerator and I’ve already sunk 85,000 colones into the damned thing.’

Now it is clear that this country story-teller, this master of wood, is telling me a parable about my frenetic attempt to save a lost cause. He has put an end to my trips to Sarchí with a rotten board in the back of my truck. Gently, sagely, proverbially, with an exquisite twist of shopfront irony, Francisco has helped me to finish a thought, to come to a conclusion, to leave something behind and get on with important things. All he did was tell me a story about his refrigerator. On Wednesday morning, the garbage men will haul away a rotten old board.

The debris of dinner now cleared away on this evening flight home, a treasured volume stares up at me from my tray-table. ‘Beware of books with two subtitles!’, someone should have instructed me, but I was left to find this truth on my own. Zion’s Final Destiny might have been enigmatic title enough for Chris Seitz’ relentlessly technical 215 pages, but this former Yale scholar—or his publisher—pressed for more: The Development of the Book of Isaiah, reads the first subtitle, A Reassessment of Isaiah 36–39, runs the second.

As a biblical scholar, my calling would be a mockery were I not to seek out moments of undistracted mental exertion to follow arcane arguments—like Seitz’—to their end. You only finish a book like the one that stares up at me now if you care very much about the topic. It is countercultural to bend neurons to this task, irreverently non-pragmatic, shamelessly impractical, an unnecessary complication, an uncompensated waste of time.

That’s the best part about it.

For maybe—just maybe—those medieval theologians were right when they suggested that to analyze and understand the created world is to aim to think God’s thoughts after him. We are, all of us, victims and beneficiaries of the information explosion that would possess our minds with only the most digestible of thoughts. The quest for practicality above all else turns us into walking, talking Least Common Denominators.

Whatever slips through the net with the greatest of ease becomes the thing we think, the way we live, the persons we have become.

That, I believe, is why the discipline of finishing a thought is an overlooked virtue, much in need of energetic recovery.

The pleasure of knowing something about some thing is no mere narcissism. It is a taking seriously of the given, an honoring of creation, a noble and ennobling sympathy with fellow human beings who before us or with us have thought hard, have written well, have shared what they themselves have come to know. For the believer, it is as well a delighting in the Creator, a celebration of the generosity and fascination that are embedded so deeply in every fiber of this world.

It seems no exaggeration to suggest that it is good—perhaps it is even holy—to turn off the radio, run from the crowd, excuse oneself from the friends, and to seek an hour to finish a thought. Read a book with enough care to sum up what its author believes. Watch a movie attentively enough to know why I liked it, or did not. Learn a language well enough to speak it from the inside, knowing why ‘they’—or we—say it like this, and not like that. Pray a prayer I’ll remember having voiced an hour from now, and a week.

This habit of the heart, like so many which are nursed in private, eventually enriches the community. A college professor I revere once told me ‘Ideas change the world’. I’ve had years to smart under that earnest fallacy, spoken with so much conviction, punished and dismissed by what passes—how quickly it passes—for reality. Now, twenty years on, I wonder whether he was almost right, less naive than I have come to suppose.

People with ideas, perhaps, do change the world if an old mentor’s words can be reshaped. But not with the bombast and profile I imagined he intended. People who care enough to finish a thought, I think, change the world from below, in the shadows, with the volume turned down.

My colleague Gary knows what he thinks. This cauldron of humor, Mensa-ish wordplayer, class clown, self-appointed Morale Officer, has in the quieter corners of his life finished some thoughts. That’s why I seek him out when the laughter has faded for a word of orientation, for a quiet paragraph of wisdom, for one last check before I decide. Such friends are priceless, their counsel a treasure. One learns to yearn to know what they think.

The sages must have known about such folks when they spoke of ‘many counselors’ as the locus of enduring wisdom. Maybe it is not clubby senates and pretentious assemblies where the many wise are to be sought, their wisdom to be found. Perhaps the light they shed shines brightest, one-by-one, in the private counsel of women and men who have labored to the finish in lonely places over the complex and the befuddling. Clarity awaits in that place.

The biblical teller of proverbs knew the power of ‘straight-forward words’, honed as they’ve been by prior and private thought. He considered such counsel the truest of affection: ‘One who answers with straightforward words’, he tells the novice who knows not the value of things, ‘gives a kiss on the lips.’