Perspective

Living in rural Missouri some years ago on very little money, I had steadily downgraded my wheels and now found myself in a 1967 Mercury Cougar with a lot of problems. One day I picked up the car from the local garage after replacing the thermostat for the fourth time. My mechanic Doug—he was no automotive snob; you should have seen what he drove—dropped the keys in my hand with a sad look and said, gently, “lost cause.”

I looked around the garage for a second opinion and locked eyes with Tiny, who was, of course, a very large man. I need to relate an observation about Tiny at this point. (Two, actually, though this has nothing to do with the story. He had a doppelgänger, another mechanic about half his size that looked like a mirror image of him: bushy beard, dark hair, same ball cap with the same crease in the bill, wearing grease-stained jeans, short-sleeved blue shirt, vaguely brown boots. It was unnerving.) The observation is this: Tiny never spoke. He never grunted. He never made any opinion known about anything.

As I looked at him, silently pleading, he slowly nodded his great bushy-bearded head in assent. The car was doomed. I bled my meager bank account dry and left the garage in a bad mood.

Walking toward the car, I could see that it was covered in a patina of dust. Splash marks in the dust left by large, scattered raindrops were just beginning to appear. I got in the car and flipped on the wipers, which didn’t work. No matter; the rain stopped before it ever really began, and I pointed the chrome nose of the Cougar out of town. A number of miles down the road was a little state park that I loved, a stretch of green on both banks of a river that was sheltered by lush trees and underbrush—my destination.

Or so I thought. I never made it that far. Rather I got sidetracked by a small country chapel nearly hidden by summer-thick trees. I don’t remember much about it these years later—just that there was a shrine to the Virgin a short distance from the rough wooden building. Also, one thought: this may have been the perfect location for a church. Beside a gentle river, in a grove, a green lawn spread out in front of its front door; if God couldn’t be found here, God was not to be found. I didn’t go inside the building to worship; I worshipped where I was, “in church” in every reasonable sense.

Confronted at one point with a spreading tree on the edge of the church’s lawn, I was possessed by a very Zacchaeus-like thought: to climb. I did. The elevation didn’t change my perspective; in fact, I felt stupid. But no one was there, so I climbed back down with a new appreciation for the urge that made a little man take to the trees to get a look at God’s son. I felt like, in that place, I had glimpsed him too.