Keep Chipping Away
Michelangelo, David’s Right Hand, 1504
Hunched over an emerging sculpture, the great Italian painter, sculptor, architect Michelangelo, towering out over the sixteenth-century Renaissance and beyond, is quoted as saying, “another few days and life will break through.” Every writer or artist, whether great or small, knows what this is like. There is the waiting, when nothing seems to jell, when everything lies flat and lifeless. Some days we might even question whether that new life is just an illusion. Our culture tilts heavily in that direction. Is there really new life out there to be found by my paltry words or halting brush strokes?
We’re talking about something bedrock here. What is this life waiting to break through? Does it lie deep within the stone we handle with our hands? Where is it, in there, out there, up there, down there? And where does the confidence come from that it will come again?
Here’s the bedrock part. If we’re going to keep sitting with Michelangelo chipping away, we have to believe there is life within the stone. Gerard Manley Hopkins, from the nineteenth century, says it this way: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” It will “flame out,” often unexpectantly. After all God has created a world where “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” That’s our starting point, isn’t it? That’s where we get our confidence that “another few days and life will break through.”
The horrible tragedy of our time is that we have sought to obliterate anything like a deep down freshness. We have also sought to push to the margins those sources that have always pointed the way toward such freshness, our Holy Scriptures, great literature and art, the kind of conversations that take us deeper with each other. Things have grown flat and lifeless. We are left fishing in the shallows, as Jesus sees it. We’ve lost sight of the deep waters where we can cast our nets.
We live in dark times, frightening times, empty, vacant, anxious, lonely, shallow times. To propose to this world there is new life waiting to be born takes courage, patience, perseverance. You’ve got to sit there chipping away at the stone. You’ve got to overcome your own trepidation and timidity. You’ve got to keep focus. You’ve got to keep that vision shaped from deep down things.
We live in a world obsessed with politics. Do we really believe that new life will come from politics? Do we really think it matters this much? I heard both our presidential candidates speak last week. The language from both was vile, dividing, self-serving, combative, ugly. Can this possibly be the place where we find new life pulsing from beneath the surface that might help us move toward a better future? These are the times my words grow flat and lifeless and when my confidence for new life is challenged.
I often think of the great St. Benedict, in the sixth century, as Rome was disintegrating. What did he do? He pulled out of it all. He began laying plans for one of the first great monasteries that would change the face of Europe and the world. His plan, as he told his aspiring monks, was to turn away from all the confusion and mayhem swirling around and focus on personal transformation. He was often, and still is, accused of being escapist.
But change will come, he surmised, only if we can “rouse ourselves from lethargy.” Wake up. It’s getting late. We must get going. It’s time to “open our eyes to the light that shows us the way to God.” We can’t afford to harden our hearts to that light. If we can keep our focus, we just may be able to bring new light to our desperate, dark world.
Maybe that’s where we begin too. Maybe we shorten our frame of reference, our focus, our preoccupations. With Benedict, maybe now is the time to withdraw again to our prayer chairs for prayer and reading. With Michaelangelo, maybe its time to keep on chipping away until the new life breaks through again. Maybe then we’ll discover we have something to say into our broken world and even into our own broken lives.
It’s hard, isn’t it? The best I can do for today is to promise I will keep on chipping away until the new life breaks free again. I promise I will work hard every day not to lose sight of God’s light shining into my little corner. I’m determined to dip into that dearest freshness deep down things.