The Sacred Informal

In the spring of 1963 a modest earthquake rumbled through northern Vermont. It happened in the late evening. My father felt it. The next morning he checked out the damages. Down in the basement the north wall had buckled. It was a freestanding, dry stacked-stone wall about 40 feet long, with no mortar between the large rocks. It wasn't a basement, but rather more like a root cellar with a dirt floor. The wall had buckled with the center of the wall pushed out more than a foot. My father's economical solution to this was to pour a footer along the breached wall and somehow brace up the stone. He hired a young man to dig the footer. While digging, the wall collapsed almost pinning the man in the rubble. When the north wall collapsed it took the west wall with it, leaving the house dangling over a large hole. My father's hope of remodeling the place dissolved in the face of the very survival of the structure. What we didn't know at the time was that the house was a timber frame construction. The mortise and tenon joints pegged with oak and maple pegs could withstand almost anything except fire. So the house dangled for a week or so while he tried to clear out the stone so he could put a few jacks in to brace the corner.

His name was Omer. He showed up one morning to survey the damages. His qualifications were, as I overheard him talking to my father, that he had built or rebuilt every railroad bridge and trestle from Montreal to Portland, Maine. After 30 years he was now retired. He surveyed the damages like someone who receives a gift. I could tell he loved what he saw--a real problem that could be solved only with bulldozers, big timber, men and lots of concrete.

The next day Omer had his crew and a small bulldozer moving the rubble out of the basement. With the crew engaged, the equipment moving, my brothers and I crouched frozen with excitement on the stairs watching the action. We found that Omer could not resist an audience. He would come over and tell us stories of bootlegging whiskey during the prohibition. He moved booze across Lake Memphremagog late at night in a rowboat with muffled oars and a long trail of bottles tied together at the necks being towed just below the surface. There were other stories of dodging revenuers on the border, precisely where my father was inspecting traffic for US Immigration. We were baptized into the lore of the border town and its occasional economic opportunities, and became vested members of the community entrusted with a secret part of its story.

I never really figured out exactly why, but one day soon after the bulldozing was finished, we saw a man with a team of big work horses coming down the street. It might have been an economic move, in that the team of horses was cheaper than the bulldozer or that this horse-pulling team needed some exercise. It was never clear. His name was Heedy. He owned a small farm in town and in the summers he competed with this team in horse pulling contests in the area where teams of workhorses would compete pulling large sledges of concrete.

Heedy was a big man with the standard coveralls and old fedora. We watched mesmerized as he backed the horses down the dirt ramp into the basement. Attached to the harness gear was a fresno, a wheelbarrow-shaped piece of steel with handles on the back to steer and an open front to scoop the dirt.

"Who's gonna dig?" Heedy asked scanning the room. One of the stout young laborers came forward and grasped the handles. He spread his legs out, tightened his grip on the handles and nodded at the horse driver. Vermont soil isn't really soil; it is rocks with a little dirt mixed in. The horses, who were used to pulling five-ton concrete sledges across dry ground in competition, heard the "heeyaw." The young man stiffened his arms, trying to get a bite in the dirt with the fresno. It was hard to judge from where we were just how far the kid actually flew, but to our young eyes it was a distance we only imagined possible. He flew like a fly on the end of a fly rod.

The worker got up from the dirt floor and brushed himself off. Heedy backed the team down for another go at it. At this rate it would take a very long time to move any significant amount of dirt, but to us, the audience on the stairs, the entertainment value of this grand exercise couldn't be touched with the snorting horses, the jangling sound of the harness gear, the grunts and groans of effort; it was magic. After a few hours it was apparent that no one would be able to operate the fresno. The three or four workers had all had a go at the horse digging shovel and they were beat after two hours of being thrown around the basement.

The basement project took a couple of months to complete. Most of the digging was by hand with picks and shovels. The concrete for the massive walls that Omer designed was mixed in a small cement mixer. Omer even built the kitchen cabinets that can hold much more than dishes, cabinets a bridge builder would be proud of.

That was my first taste of restoration work, watching men deal with ancient tensions in old ways with little equipment. And for the next few decades it would be my only context for restoration. My rudimentary understanding of the world of man-made things saw restoration as restoring tension. But then there came another earthquake.

I came back to the old house in the spring of 2002. My father had died a few months earlier. He had broken his hip in Mexico and was medivaced to Phoenix, Arizona where he died soon after. My oldest daughter was keeping my mother company at the old house. My Mom was grieving and my daughter had become very sick. My daughter has cystic fibrosis, a congenital lung disease, which seems to flare up when you least expect it. So my brother and I flew into New Jersey and drove up to Vermont to check on them.

I had been wondering about the restoration of rivers for a while now. I had been decamped outside of organized religion for some time. Sickness and death make the forge in which ideas of the divine are superheated and galvanized. The religious dross is burned off and you are left with the pure simple elements of life.

My father's remains were placed in the liquor cabinet in the living room until a suitable burial place could be found. His ashes were contained in an urn that had the look of an Etruscan vase. The cabinet was full of his favorite momentos from his travels and gifts from his sons, along with the bottled spirits and drinking glasses. The cabinet had an interior light and glass shelves, so everything in it had a museum display quality about it. It reminded me of ancient people whose funerary rights included being buried with their favorite things. For effect, my mother had found a medieval helmet with a long brass noseguard on it. She placed the helmet on the glass shelf which just cleared the top of the urn; the noseguard came halfway down, giving the object the a new look. Now my Father had the look of a portly warrior from the 11th century guarding his prized possessions. It was odd but we were comfortable with him in the cabinet. It was a sign of how far from formal religion we had come. Death was still difficult but in this moment much more intimate. We were embracing it in a more healthy way. When you went to grab a wine glass there he was. Very personal. He was toasted frequently.

My mother missed my father terribly. Fifty-one years of partnership had ended. They had raised eight sons, traveled widely and enjoyed life. She was dealing with the great void in front of her. With the patriarch gone, many of the day-to-day decisions fell on my brothers and me. For myself, I knew when my father, the signature authority in my life, died, all his expectations of me died with him. The bond that held us together was gone. The exploration of my own life widened considerably. Much of my life had been cued on what he thought good or bad. Even in my many rebellions against his authority, those were held within the context of his orbit of acceptance. Now self-discovery would take on a new dimension. But that new dimension was a great weight, a new unknown, a new level of loneliness. It was a big change in my river of life. Like the old salmon, my father had journeyed far and challenged everything he came across. His ashes were at the beginning of things, the old house where he first truly challenged life, began to make his mind up about many things, grew a garden, and worked at fixing and restoring our home. The old place was loaded with memories of his efforts in all those arenas.

My daughter looked like a ghost. She had no energy. She crept around the house moving from the bed to the easy chair and back to bed again. I had been through this before but this time it wasn't just the physical sickness making her weak, life itself seemed to be draining from her. I was very frightened. I felt like we were holding hands, looking over an abyss, ready to jump into eternity. I wasn't ready for that.

The second morning of my stay I was lying in bed trying to measure the weight of my dead father, my grieving mother and my sick daughter, when the house began to shake. Northern Vermont had a 5.5 earthquake. There were lottery-type odds at work for this to happen while I was staying at the old place. As far as I knew, the last quake of any size in that area had happened 39 years earlier. I tried to figure out the cosmic significance of this event, but I came up with no idea other than I was there feeling and listening to the low thunder of movement. Just maybe it was a seismic hug, an outsized reminder that God was there.

That afternoon I tried to make arrangements for my daughter to go home. She lay on my mother's bed. I laid down next to her. She was coughing a lot and her countenance was grey. It was at this moment that I realized the profoundness of hearing someone breathe, of being alive and the enormity of the value it has. As ragged as her breath was, it was breath, it was life. So we laid there close and talked. We determined to live until we died. The difficult moment passed. We were at peace with what we had. I measured the moment. We needed no clergy to comfort us. All the religious ideas of healing faded away. There were no incantations to speak, no great scripture reading for comfort. We no longer had to push a religious abstraction of healing into the future. I had read somewhere that God only hears the authentic. When we are in pain, our groans go up as prayers, holy vowels making utterances that go straight to the ear of God. Or when we gasp with wonder it floats up as true worship. These unguarded emotional releases come from the deep places in our souls, places that the divine can connect with.

I was sorrowful the whole time I was there. I guess it was a time to grieve, mourn and commiserate. It was appropriate and honest. There was no awkwardness. We were truly there the whole time, hip deep in the emotions swirling around, absorbing all this life and passage. We owned the moment.

It seemed that this earthquake shook the old walls one more time, they came down, and they didn't have to be put up again. The tensions were being released and we were finally realizing it was OK to let them go. Restoration was happening. I didn't even see it, but I tasted the intimacy of it.

Part of this restoration process brought me further down into myself, that place where the core values are formed. The earthquake got me thinking about the old house and those times. My father was from the Bronx. He had no experience with restoring old houses, having a large family or growing a garden. But he was doing all three simultaneously. He was constantly reading everything he could get his hands on regarding these topics. You can get a lot of information from books but they cannot deliver confidence. The great basement project led to the great remodeling project.

After the earthquake and the house almost falling into the basement, cracks in the plaster appeared everywhere. My father was stuck trying to remodel an ancient house of great character into something functional within his meager budget. Wood paneling and a hung ceiling were the new addition to the kitchen. A functioning Glenwood E wood cookstove was taken out as was the wall with a built-in china cabinet. Paneling was cheap and relatively easy to install. We put it everywhere we could. It neatly covered the plaster. We also grew a very large garden. We had to. It was a fundamental part of the budget.

The little boy who looked at the basement project in wonder soon became one of the workers making concrete and managing the wayward garden crew of little boys. The lack of confidence that my father never expressed, appeared as stress and worry. I think he looked over that precipice of fear frequently. The quake had forced our meager hand and tripled his work load and his worry. He looked to me to relieve some of the tension. Worry, I think, gave into thinly veiled panic. I felt doom was hovering over us and we were barely ahead of it. They were hard times. So I shoveled cement, hoed the garden, put up paneling and ran away when I could. Our world was mostly work and worry.

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It was now the fall of 2003. My daughter was well and my mother was coming to grips with her grief. I returned to the old house to finish some projects that hadn't been touched since the quake of '63. Two of my friends from town, real carpenters, were hired and the three of us dove in. They worked and I was the go-to guy, usually found on my way to the hardware store for supplies and coffee. I spent five weeks in Vermont, watching the colors turn, becoming reacquainted with old friends and moving through the project. My mother and I morphed back into old family regimens. I felt the stress from nowhere. I was under pressure. The job was not difficult; there were skilled workers and plenty of money for materials, but it felt very difficult. We completed our task and my mother was happy with the results, yet I was all stress and worry.

I took the train from northern New York back to Colorado, a 50-hour trip. I had plenty of time to rethink my childhood. I discovered that the quake of '63 still rolled through my heart. Those times had galvanized my view of the world; they became my core beliefs. From that time on I developed a pattern of creating stress in my life, because it was familiar. All my beliefs had rested on this odd foundational perspective. This trip had exposed them to the light of my consciousness and they were no longer shrouded in darkness. I finally got a glimpse of the arch performer engaged in a game of work and rejection throughout my life. You could throw any belief on that merry-go-round and it would come out the same way, because I had my very own religion, my own controls and my own god. Everything else was just a convenient fulcrum for the practice of my secret faith. With this discovery, my dam gave way and the sediment of bitterness and years of frustration poured through. The peace was in the flow of the moment. Everything moved fast past my consciousness. Reactions gave way to responses. I had choices for the first time in many arenas of my life. The small order of fear was giving way to a big divine order, the type of order that governs rivers and life, keeping them self-sustaining and abundant. Memories of the earthquakes are part of who I am, but slowly I began stretching myself into the healthy unknown flow of life, going a little farther upstream where I had never been before.

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As I studied rivers they led me to unlikely places. I learned that the first dam in the country to be taken down for purely environmental reason was the Number 11 dam on the Clyde River. The Clyde is a small river in Northern Vermont which flows from the southern end of Lake Memphremagog, a very large lake which straddles the US and Canada, and empties into Island Pond, Vermont, some 35 miles south. Island Pond is both the name of the lake and the town. The estuary of the Clyde was located between Albert La Liberty's blacksmithing/farm machinery repair/parts for anything emporium and Trudy's Cafe. The Hotel Osborne, across the street, straddled the river. I remember looking over the river in Trudy's parking lot at the sucker run each spring where we would grapple them with treble hooks and throw them on the road and watch the logging trucks squash the fish under their great tires. But there were thousands of those dark grey fish with big whiskers crowded together in the shallow waters. Yes, I had a vibrant memory of this small river. To read that it had an established place in the history of contemporary river restoration made me smile.

New England had been home to great runs of salmon when the first settlers arrived. By the 1850s these great runs had all but disappeared. The primary reason was the construction of dams. One hundred fifty years later these small dams scattered throughout New England were becoming points of controversy. Their usage in many cases had run out. Many of them produced modest amounts of power, power that could be lost without any real increase in electrical rates. Rivers were now known to be redeemable even after years of neglect. Restoration involves a fair amount of research into what the river was before the dams were put in. Folks were startled, reading the old reports of rivers full of salmon and other species of fish.

The Number 11 dam was the focus of a relicensing of the Citizen's Utility Company's hydroelectric development on the Clyde River. The dam and a 1000-foot diversion were built against the will of a vociferous citizenry in which hunting and fishing were at the center of their lives. When the dam was completed in 1957, it devastated runs of landlocked salmon, walleyed pike and trout. Even with the river blocked with dams it was still listed as one of the premier trout fishing streams in America. During the relicensing public hearings in 1994, local citizens begged the state and federal regulators to take down the dam.

While this great argument was going on nature had its own plans. The heavy spring snowmelt was still moving down the mountains. The pressure at the #11 dam was such that the water spill over the dam was not sufficient to relieve the pressure. Water began to seep around the earthen section at the right end of the dam. Throughout the day and night of April 30, 1994 the water worked its way through the far end of the dam. By morning of the next day the generators had shut down due to low water in the canal. The generators were turned off and the river continued to flow around the dam.

Two years later on August 28, 1996 the dam was dynamited and reduced to rubble. A school of landlocked salmon were able to move upstream to their traditional spawning beds for the first time in 39 years. There are still three dams with powerhouses on the river. These hydroelectric units survive on year-to-year licensing permits, so there is a possibility of the Clyde running free throughout its short but vital course.

The eastern US has a temperate climate. The geomorphology of the land is mostly low-lying hills with moderate rainfall. The river systems of the East are fairly stabilized, and although they flood like most rivers do, their seasonal variations are modest compared with the rivers of the West. Because of the terrain texture, the rivers are smaller with many streams and brooks feeding into the larger rivers. Their nature is gentled and constant. The dam that came down in Newport, Vermont, was on a small river. The tension created by the dam was modest and the sediment released was immediately manageable for the river

In a spiritual context this was news of a variety that transcends the newspaper and the television. It was a small ray of hope in the battle of river politics and vested interests. A dam had come down for the reasons of the life in it. A few years later the Edwards dam on the Kennebec River in Maine came down as well.

I began to see that restoration could only truly happen outside of the power venues. I couldn't change Christianity or its manifold denominations. All I could do was change myself, by realizing the man-made constructions in my own life. This thought process began by following my own intuition. Restoration is the sovereign work of the individual. If we don't know ourselves or our own nature, how can we truly know God or anyone else?

Contemplating the deconstruction of dams goes way beyond our simplistic mechanical ways of thinking. We have to stretch our idea of time into generations for the restoration to have its full effect. Our politics and our policies have be taken out of the immediate and put into the long-term. For a long time we have been able to get a measure of forgiveness for our blunders by passing a few laws and promising never to do it again, but these rivers are demanding restitution. Our shortsightedness is demanding a price. Eighty percent of the dams in the US are up for review over the next 20 years by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. I wonder if we will be able to pay the price?

The Christian religious institutions of America have to look at restoration in a similar fashion. True restoration is something we are not familiar with. We lack the mindset for this type of work. We also lack the dimensional aspects of time and circumstances that are out of our control. Restoration is the work of God when it comes to spiritual matters. There are small streams of life flowing between us that we have considered unimportant. These are quiet relational streams in which we can find fulfillment and meaning. They are devoid of doctrines, rules and regulations. They are rivers that flow unimpeded through our lives.

Christianity, as a political catchment for belief, has brought America where it is today. We are an empire. I doubt that it was ever the intention of Jesus to create a political empire. It seems he ran from it the times he was offered it. There are times I think that this faith that was introduced was a natural extension of normal hospitality, that the river flowed with dynamic intimacy from relationship to relationship, from home to home, from chance meeting to chance meeting, and from coffee shop to cafe. It was not impeded by social structures. It flowed freely through the low gravity of everyday life. The faith was never a net of agenda to get people to gather formally under a ritualistic hierarchical religion.. The informal is sacred. That is why religion is constantly trying to invade our homes. It is where the life is.

For many years there has been a set equation; if you are a Christian, you go to church. There hasn't been much legitimacy for those who are working out their relationship with God and men on a day-to-day basis without any organizational structure. They are looked upon as those who can't abide authority; kooks and lefties playing with fire--dancing with the devil himself. What many people are looking for is the spiritually authentic, something in their lives that isn't fractured and prone to being managed. We are exhausted from those things that are man-made. The economic, political and religious systems invade our every moment. There is hardly any relief from the constant messaging. We are dull with regulation, products, information and good intentions. It seems there are no sacred places left.

When I heard about the dams coming down on the Clyde River and fish going up to spawn in ancient places, it seemed that the idea from the margins had hope of gaining a foothold in our conscience. Maybe we also can go to places that have been blocked from our visitation for a long time. Maybe we can subscribe to a larger context of spiritual order, something that is truly out of our control, unpredictable, turbulent, full of variation and life. Something like a river.

So the real restoration has begun; our perspectives are changing. Rivers are seen as legitimate natural entities. The simplicity of that perspective has a tendency to move right by us without us really noticing. But it is the foundational perspective. To begin anything there must be an essential legitimacy. This right competes with our ideas of manifest destiny. It stirs up a hornets' nest of property right conflicts. But the fact that the idea is in the minds of people and that they have engaged the system and taken out the machines and blockades that restrained the rivers and the life in it is noteworthy.

I was reading a magazine article on a plane about the aborigines and their concept that God had sung the universe into existence; when the young men reached puberty they would go out and find their song in nature. After I had read that I wondered if I could stretch the "God said" of creation into "God sang"? And here we are, trying to find this song in creation; we find it after releasing the tension of our structures. And when the waters move freely, I know that it is God singing. After all, it is said that His voice is like rushing waters.

Give the river back to God. Focus on the real human and divine relationships. Leave the management of the faith to God. Leaders should be gardeners, midwives and nurserymen. Don't block maturity. Be for life and very careful about institutional good. Let there be one place in our lives that is not regulated, a sanctuary from the systems of men, a place of honest free-flowing relationships, where the religious brokers are not allowed and where the integrity of the individual walk is restored.

Restoration is like the work of poets full of contemplation; quiet time observing, and finally allowing beautiful and delicate things to connect. It is deconstruction of man-made things. It is removing monuments of our dominion over life. It is understanding the immediacy of convenience balanced against a new appreciation of life and its long-term cycles. It is understanding the work of seasons and grander cycles of weather and geology. We have to retune our minds to much more natural themes of time and work, and these things are happening to real people. Regular folk are walking around with a new gravitas about the physical world they live in, and are seeing the connecting flows. Our awareness of the world around us has increased.

Much has been made about the environmental movement. There seems to be a simplistic idea about the movement and its efforts in stopping progress and saving particular species of plants and animals from extinction. In the past 30 years, because of the efforts of this movement, a host of laws have been enacted to preserve and protect the world we live in. Because its efforts exist in the physical world, it is of course political. But the mindset, the posture created when we look at our world, was born in many ways from that movement. From farmers to fishermen, everyone has to be more aware of what they do because it is the law.

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