Going Green: How to Recycle a Prayer

“Pride in craftsmanship is well explained by saying that to labor is to pray, for conscientious effort to realize an ideal is a kind of fidelity.” 

-Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, page 73.

In the chapter of Lost in the Cosmos entitled “The Self as Nought”, Walker Percy describes a very peculiar aspect of our society, namely the attraction toward antique furniture. The attraction has expanded to the point at which, for lack of actual bespoke coffee tables of appropriate agedness, other non-table antique objects have been converted into, or sold as the beginnings of, antique coffee tables –– anything from an old lobster trap to a disused mortician’s slab comprising an eligible and lucrative candidate for such transfiguration.

What interested Walker Percy about this phenomenon were its implications concerning the state of the self: “How the self tries to inform itself by possessing things which do not look like the things they’re used as” (the subtitle to his chapter). Although you can probably follow this provocation down a fairly true path using your own wits, I will not give away the conclusions to which he comes, or rather the questions which he asks in order to deter a misguided or unearned conclusion.

What seems supremely interesting to today’s reader is the manner in which the phenomenon that Percy cites has attached itself to popular morality. The reuse and recycling of old household objects and building materials has become a most fashionable moral imperative. But I wonder if there is also some reduction involved when we borrow our furniture from the dead. If Weaver is right and the table made by your great great grandfather is indeed at least the symbol of a prayer, then is it appropriate for you to set your coffee down upon it?

To the conservative, both political and religious, the answer must be yes. As Eliot put it, “The communication of the dead,” whether through the stroke of pen or planer, “is tongued with a fire beyond the language of the living,” and what better prayer than that treated and stained in the mysterious chemical heat of time. But there is a qualifier. Just as the words of the Lord’s Prayer must be said with honest belief, lest they be irreverent and ineffectual, you must be honest, especially with yourself, about what the table is (a wonder of human fidelity to an ideal and an artifact of Providence), and you must believe that it is as real as it happens to be.

Although I am reluctant to seem a Calvinist among carpenters, we must also remember that it is also possible to make prayers for ourselves. There is wood in the hills, and also in the strip malls, where may be found also nails, and tools of many colors. Not every table need have seated men in powdered wigs, and neither must every table’s boards have mingled with your own blood and toil. But there are tables to be had, nonetheless. So, go forth, shunning pressboard, and being not like the Pharisee who shops at Restoration Hardware.