vitalwholeness

The project actually began with a firepit wrought iron tool. The ten-year old excavator began digging in my back yard by the old barn next to a tree that has been alive twice as long as I have. I’m not exactly sure what gave rise to the dig, except that once the first chunk of sod was turned over the next was soon to follow. In time a friend rode up and began to help. Since firepit tools have their digging limits, they asked if I had a shovel they could borrow. Yes, in the shed, help yourself. Go ahead, dig up my yard.

Bemused neighbors strolled by and gave curious looks. Is this a new landscaping plan going into place? Perhaps installing a drain? How about a tree? Those are all good guesses from adults who would never think of going to the trouble of digging unless it was for some necessary addition. Why else would the boys be digging there? Those are all good adult questions. That’s how we think. And we’re too tired to expend unnecessary effort. I don’t dig a hole unless I have to.

For my part I knew I would cheer them on because ten-year old kids need someplace to be doing something fun and purposeful. Like digging a hole, for example. Better digging a hole than running over little old ladies with their bikes down by the Piggly Wiggly. Much better expending all that raw energy at my place. Besides, they need interested adults to sit and observe them with interest as long as they don’t interfere too much. Just get them them the tools they need and give an eloquent grunt every so often.

I think the real reason I gave the green light to digging up the yard is that I was them a handful of decades ago. I have memories of a variety of hole digging escapades in different places for different reasons. The motives of a ten-year old are quite different than those I carry now.

For instance, throughout adulthood I have fallen into many an unexpected hole and have dug more than a few all by myself. Digging out of a hole once you’re at the bottom requires no little effort, patience and timely help by others who are able and willing to reach down and give you a hand.

That is not, however, the reason a ten-year old digs. Motives reach across a gamete of possibilities. More than once we dug holes to bury something to find later. One time I buried a handful of half dollars in a little jewelry box to protect the treasure from pirates. One day I came home from school only to find that a backhoe was digging up the area for some utility project and my cache was lost to the mists of time.

After our dog dug under the fence to make the great escape into the neighborhood, we thought it was a good idea to dig the tunnel deeper so that little humans could wiggle through in the same way. My parents did not share my same enthusiasm for that idea. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why.

If we were in the play golf with the neighbor kids across the front yards phase, then hole digging was practical; a course was laid out with cups and flags dug into the lawn. My father was not especially fond of mowing over those.

The essence of it all. regardless of form or purpose, has to do with something else, the digging of the hole itself, the call of the wild to dig. It may be the opposite and equal reason one must climb a mountain, because it is there. Except the hole is not there yet. The movement is down instead of up, burrowing through the planet to the other side, or descending to hidden shafts and caves that honeycomb hidden domains beneath our feet. Some people feel compelled to plunge into the ocean depths or spelunk in the bowls of the earth for the same reason, reverse astronauts who explore strange new worlds below where few people have gone before.

In this late autumn of my life the holes I dig are less in the back yard and more in the ground of relationships, creativity, and the spirit. I am curious about the depths of others and the hidden treasure of the world. I am fascinated by the hidden forces that make everything buzz. Receiving the the gift of each day means something like figuring out what I have missed in plain sight, or mining the depths of memory, dreams or the big universal stories. It’s possible that all my youthful hole digging was preparing me for a different kind of digging later, the important work of removing the soil of the soul one scoop at a time. And then the next.

Every time we approach holy week in the Christian story cycle I take another run at it. Year after year I plunge the spade into the soil and turn over another level. Sometimes it seems like I’m striking rock. Then a day comes along for no special reason and I uncover gold just beneath the surface. The thorny problem, the irreconcilable tension, the offensive idea just pop to the surface like lost coins.

This year it was making sense of the cross in a new way, under the auspicious of crushing. The instrument of crushing demolishes humanity, as the inhumanity of this world so often does. And the instrument of crushing demolishes the signs of the sacred in the world, as this darkened world so often attempts. When Jesus was crucified he was the face of humanity constantly crushed and the face of the divine constantly rejected. Of course, that is the symbol that tells the tale, the hard truth of the world as it is.

What is told, too, during this Holy Saturday of the tomb, is despite how we attempt to bury light, truth, and beauty, the visible holes we dig often become passageways to unseen dimensions. By the grace of God, they do.

Until we put down our shovels at the last.