This Woodsculpture course was something I had wanted to do for some time. Actually, I hadn’t thought about wood in particular until I came across the course brochure, but I’d been in love with Michelangelo’s craft for years. Wood, it turned out, can’t be “just” sculpted or carved, like stone. You need to go with the “grain”, and even if you treat it as it wants to be treated (and not as you initially planned), it might still split later, or take on a different colour, and other things that stone doesn’t do. That’s of course what living things are all about, the unpredictibility of life – and often the will of one being against the other. I chipped away happily for the first session of the course, about two hours, and was so exhausted after that that I came home and went straight to bed!

At the second session, I realised that I had chosen a piece of wood with a really good “resistance factor” to my efforts: mahogany. I tried all kinds of different tools that the tutor hadn’t really introduced us to but that were lying around, and while the other students where happy with just their chisels, I filed and I sandpapered, I scratched and I sawed. And the piece looked more and more unsightly. I ended up taking it home to see what if anything could still be done with it, and secretly decided to skip the third and last session of this “Summer School”.

This morning, I had another look at my sorry piece of resistance wood, and started taking it in my hands, trying to think how to mold it to make it “better”. First, I decided that it needed to be cut in two and maybe something could then be done with the separate pieces. I’d have to do lots more work, but it would eventually become the piece I originally envisioned: perfectly round and smooth.

And then something happened: the mahogany chunk suddenly felt complete. It was totally and utterly “good” as it was, at least that’s what my hands told me. While I was stroking its irregularities, the chips and “wounds” of my perfecting it, I realised that what I had in my hands was me. Not perfect, not even remotely beautiful, but with an unchangeable (or at least not within the time of a three-week course) shape that still resembled pretty much the original piece as I had found it in the workshop.

But I had done something to it, and it showed: there were smooth parts on the sides, patches of rough wood where I had used a file that was too coarse, the corners that I had hewn round with a chisel but that needed smoothing with sandpaper. Where I had thought to cut it in half, it turned out that this was the perfect size of wood to hold in two hands at the same time (and hit someone over the head with, if need be!). If you weren’t careful, you could still draw a splinter from it – this piece would never be as smooth and perfect as I had originally thought.

Also, the final touch would be to oil it and make it shiny, but as my tutor had told me, you don’t do that unless you are perfectly happy with the shape of the wood, since the oiling brings out each and every single imperfection of the carving process. Of couse, the oiling would also bring out the fine lines in the wood that the rough piece was still hiding within itself. So there is something to look forward to – if and when I’ll have done some more smoothing around the edges, maybe I’ll take the step and oil it. Or maybe not. Because as it is now, it is a perfect reminder of where I am in my life: not done yet, no finishing touches to be applied yet, I’m still right in the middle of it, with more chiselling and filing to be done. And even if in the process, the piece gets more damaged than can be made good with sandpaper, it will still be me, the (almost) unchangeable shape, the way God has created me.

Photo: “Wood of the Cross“by John O’Keefe from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

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