The Renovating Reverend

Renovation is a messy process. Things often look awful before they begin to look good. And you sometimes jostle and disturb the nice parts of the house as you work on the damaged parts, resulting in repairs to the parts that had been nice to begin with! We have a couple of examples of this. As the trees and shrubs in the yard were being removed, parts of our sidewalk crumbled under the weight of the machinery being used. With winter coming on fast, in a neighborhood where everyone walks everywhere, we pretty much had to have professionals repair this right away. Then, when plumbers began removing the gas and water pipes from the old kitchenettes that are upstairs, they knocked loose the ductwork that feeds heat to the kitchen and the upstairs bathroom. Our budget couldn’t take another hit. This was something that I’d need to fix, and it would require entering the crawlspace beneath the kitchen.

Many Midwestern houses are built on basements. This allows easy access to utilities that come into the house, like plumbing, which has to be buried deep in the earth to avoid freezing in the winter months. Most of our house was built on a brick foundation, and has a basement with a decent height to stand upright, to work on things that are under the house. The basement floor is finished in concrete, which also makes moving around clean and easy. However, the kitchen and the level above it were built over an old porch, so that part of the house has a crawlspace that ranges from 1.5 to 2.5 feet above the dirt and rocks that were in the ground when the house was built.

I’d been in one or two tight attic spaces, but I’d never crawled beneath a house. I wasn’t very excited about sticking my head into a break in the brick wall of the bright, open basement, to shimmy my way into the dark between dirt and kitchen subfloor. I don’t mind darkness so much, but it can be uncomfortable under certain circumstances. And I’m not real crazy about tight spaces, either, although I can tolerate them for a time. I have to say that cobwebs just aren’t on my list of favorite things, either. Although the creepy-crawly creators of the cobwebs might be long gone, I just don’t care for them. And though I can usually figure out basic mechanical-type things that aren’t familiar to me, I’d never done anything with ductwork. Despite all this, I realized that necessity is the mother of invention, and often is the creator of courage, too. No matter what, I had to give it a try. I was going in.

I crawled my way over to the ductwork. I hollered to my husband, Steve, that an iron pipe made it difficult for me to reach the ducts. It turned out to be the remains of the disconnected gas pipe to one of the kitchenettes, which needed to come out, anyway. As I lay there, looking up at joists and subfloor covered with cobwebs, conduit, and pipes going every which way, and waiting for Steve to get the Sawzall for me, I had time to think about exactly where I was. I turned off my flashlight, to save the batteries. The sheer weight of the house, just inches above me, seemed very real. I could just about feel all of the old timber, lath and plaster. And I was about to fire up a power tool that would shake and vibrate a pipe that reached two stories above me. Focusing on the light that filtered in from the basement seemed like a good idea. It was the reminder of a wider reality outside of the limited space I was in, a reality that I much preferred! The view from the crawlspace was reassuring—or was it? It almost seemed like a reminder of just how cramped my position was. I turned the flashlight back on. I swung it around to look at the tuck pointing job our mason had done several weeks before. I found a cap for what was probably a 1940’s Coca-Cola bottle. There was a disintegrating paper wrapper for a block of Right-Cut chewing tobacco. More than a few folks had been here in the crawlspace before me. I began to collect old bits of brick, glass, and metal, and move them closer to the opening, so that I could clear them out of the space at a later time. When my focus shifted from potential doom to the task at hand, my fears settled down to a healthier level. I was able to make repeated cuts to that iron pipe and bring it on down. I managed to wrangle the ducts just enough to get the heat flowing in the right direction again. I eventually slid back out into the basement, covered in dusty crud.

I’ll have to go back into the crawlspace with the necessary materials to complete repairs to the ducts. But I’m not entirely dreading it. I’ve been there once before. And I’ve seen evidence of others who’ve been there before me. That’s reassuring. This is analogous to scripture, I think. The scriptures of our faiths are a chronicle of other folks’ experience of life, and of God. They usually aren’t full of perfect people who did all the right things. Scripture and sacred stories are as full of fears, screw ups, and regrets as they are holy decisions and acts of love. I’ve ceased to see sacred stories solely as roadmaps that tell us to take a left here, and a right there, and have come to recognize them as sign posts on a journey with God and others. They are reassurance that my path is not so unlike those of the founders of our faiths, and encouragement that it’s not just about doing or saying all the right things. Jesus of Nazareth certainly warned that following the rules for the sake of the rules was an empty exercise. Scripture doesn’t just direct us to look to the light outside the crawlspace, to a holy/whole-ly goal, it reminds us to continue on with our lives, just as those before us have done, growing in our sometimes cramped, sometimes bumpy relationship with God and others. Keeping this in mind can make sacred stories come alive to us in ways that might be surprisingly new and relevant…especially when we’re spending some time in the crawlspaces of life.

I invite you to read, listen to, or share a sacred story sometime soon.