By: Jim Taylor

Wood and word – the two differ by only one letter.

        I work, most of the time, with words. But I am also, sometimes, a wood carver.

        Some years back, when deadlines were more persistent than mosquitoes on a summer evening, I found escape in carving wood instead of carving words. I wore an old shirt, backwards, so that the back of the shirt collected chips and shavings as I sat beside Joan on our couch. She stitched as she watched television; I whittled wood.

        The wood always started off as a raw lump, more or less squared. But I could see something inside it – a man running, a woman holding her baby, a bison with its head lowered, a cat preening, a goose coming in for a landing…

        I couldn’t have drawn that vision. But I could see it.

        Then I spent weeks, or more, removing everything that got in the way – until the reality I held in my hands matched the vision I had had long before.



Reshaping reality

 Television used to flash up a sign occasionally: “Please do not adjust your set. We’re having trouble with our transmitter.”

        And some cynics changed it to, “Please do not adjust your mind. We’re having trouble with reality.”

        The world seems full of people who consider themselves realists. They listen to someone’s vision for a gentler, kinder world, and they say, “Be realistic!” They hear people’s prayers for peace, and they say, “Get real!” They watch someone’s ambitions come crashing down, and they say, “Welcome to the real world.”

        But for a carver, reality is a rough-hewn block of wood. No one would call it beautiful. It has no value, except perhaps as firewood.

        For a wordsmith, reality is a blank sheet of paper.

        The artist’s job is to alter those realities until they match a vision.

        Reality, in other words, is not a given. It’s merely a starting point.

        Unfortunately, the world can’t be changed as quickly as a block of wood or a sheet of paper. Achieving a vision may take lifetimes, instead of a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks.



Change takes time

But it does happen. Two hundred years ago, on March 25, 1807, the British Parliament passed the Abolition of Slave Trade Act. It took another 58 years to abolish slavery in the United States. Saudi Arabia didn’t ban slavery until 1962; perhaps only in Mauritania is it still practiced openly.

        Slavery had been the norm in almost every human society, since the beginning of history. The Bible took slavery for granted – except for the apostle Paul’s inspiration that in the new religion of Christ “there is neither slave nor free.” But even Paul later offered to buy a slave from his owner.

        Abolition of slavery demanded 17 centuries. But it did happen.

        Reality is not the final word. If a vision is powerful enough, if enough people share the vision, the vision can create a new reality.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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