Holy Joinery

 Holy Joinery

By Bobby Neal Winters

It is a ritual.  Take your wood and use a marking gauge to mark walls a distance from the end. Then make your marks on the endgrain.  Take your jig and mark slanting lines from the endgrain down to the wall.  Then you make your cut.

This is all done in silence until the saw begins cutting the dovetail.  It’s just you, your tools, and the wood.

This week, I made a box to put my drill bits and such in.  I made it out of two bed slats that were given to me.  I used neither nails nor screws. Just dovetail joints, rabbet joints, and glue.

My dovetails were noticeably better this time.  It’s something about practice, I suppose.

Sometimes while doing this, I find myself thinking about the Lord’s Supper, Communion, the Eucharist, or whatever you call it.  Maybe it’s because sometimes I cut myself, “This is my blood...,” but more seriously, I think it’s because there is a cadence to it.

I remember taking the Lord’s Supper when I was a Baptist, which was more than 30 years ago.  Well more than 30 if you count from when I stopped attending regularly, and I don’t remember the cadence of that ritual.  The cadence not in my heart is that of The Great Thanksgiving, which begins:

Pastor: The Lord be with you.

People: And also with you.

Pastor: Lift up your hearts. 

People: We lift them up to the Lord.

Pastor: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

It is right to give our thanks and praise.

The words and the rhythm have a power to them and so does the fact that we do it the same every time with only minor variation.  The rhythm puts it in the realm of music which reaches the emotions.  The sameness makes it eternal. 

When I take part in it, I am connected with every time I’ve done it and every group I’ve done it with.  Clearing this reaches into the past, but my future self will be doing this as well, so my connection is with that which is, that which was, and that which shall be.

There are minor variation, here and there, but there is a consistent core that connects back to scripture:

On the night in which he gave himself up for us, he took bread,

gave thanks to you, broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: "Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you.

Do this in remembrance of me."

This connects everyone back to that original night two millenia past.

If you go through this often enough, you’ll even begin to pay attention to the words: “This is my body...”

And you begin to think, “If Jesus is God and so has the power of creation with the word, and if the celebrant is performing the ritual as an agent of Jesus, then that Bread is the Body of Christ.”

You begin to wonder what that means, and whether there is a means of understanding the world beyond simply the scientific, a metaphysics beyond the one that is commonly understood, a mystery to be comprehended.

Reveries like this may be the reason I usually am listening to Classic Hits 93.9 on my Alexa Echo dot while I am sawing away on my dovetails.  Sometimes it can get scary when it’s just you and eternity.

While I do have my dovetail cutting ritual which I am refining in a consistent, steady way, I am changing the way that I cut rabbets. For those who don’t know, which would probably be most of you, a rabbet [sic] is a cut made along the edge of a board to make it thinner there.  It gives you more surface to make for a stronger glue-up.

I used to cut my rabbets with a router.  This takes time, patience, and makes a lot of sawdust.  Now, I am cutting my rabbets with my table saw.  I can do this because I got a new DeWalt table saw for Christmas.  This is quicker, potentially more accurate, and puts a lot less sawdust in the air and on the floor.

The rabbet is still a rabbet even though I am cutting it a different way.  Before rabbets were cut with routers, they were cut with a special sort of plane. There were probably other ways before that.  And, quite frankly, all of those ways are still going on.

All of these ways connect us with the Wood, and connect us all with the others who are seeking that connection.

Similarly, at our Holy Rituals, we connect with God and with all others who are seeking that connection:

By your Spirit make us one with Christ,

one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world,

until Christ comes in final victory, and we feast at his heavenly banquet.

Through your Son Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit in your holy Church,

all honor and glory is yours, almighty Father, now and for ever.

And so we are all connected. Our Lord was a carpenter after all.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )