And of Joseph he said: ‘Blessed of the LORD is his land, With the precious things of heaven, with the dew, And the deep lying beneath, With the precious fruits of the sun, With the precious produce of the months, With the best things of the ancient mountains, With the precious things of the everlasting hills, With the precious things of the earth and its fullness, And the favor of Him who dwelt in the [burning] bush (Deut. 33:13-16, NKJV).

One of my favorite pastimes is woodworking.  My love for working with wood came essentially from my high school shop class when our first project was to make a small cedar jewelry box for our mothers.  The smell of aromatic cedar had always captivated me—in part because that was the smell that arose whenever my mom lifted the lid on her hope chest in my folks’ bedroom.  It was where her precious things were stored.  Her taking us to that old cedar chest for something was always an adventure—an adventure similar to going to the attic.  Probably what made these quests so enjoyable was that they were almost always accompanied by  stories of my mom and dad’s past.

I believe that chest came from Stickley Brother’s Furniture in Grand Rapids, the first place that my mother had worked as a young woman.  Our dining room suite came from Stickley Brothers as well. And Mother’s first purchase there, a Windsor chair that she got for $7, remains in our home—still solid as a rock after some 85 years of use.  That chair remains while many other cheap pieces of furniture we accumulated over the years have gone to the landfill.  The famous old furniture factories of Grand Rapids, once called the “Furniture Capital of America,” knew the value of both good wood and good work.

Having those influences in my life, I was especially captivated by the words of Wendell Berry in reference to our use of the precious things of the earth that we often fail to properly value:

Wendell Berry

By denying spirit and truth to the non-human Creation, modern proponents of religion have legitimized a form of blasphemy without which the nature- and culture-destroying machinery of the industrial economy could not have been built—that is, they have legitimized bad work.

Good human work honors God’s work.  Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love.  It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands.  It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty.  To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for.  This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing his Spirit.

In the Bible we find none of the industrialist’s contempt or hatred for nature.  We find, instead, a poetry of awe and reverence and profound cherishing, as in [the] verses from Moses’ valedictory blessing of the twelve tribes [above].

Wendell Berry. Christianity and the Survival of Creation. Pantheon Books, 1992-3.
[Cedar chest photo from Lynda True]
[Stickley Brothers photo source]