Wisdom Through Callouses: Lessons from a Life in Woodworking
About two decades ago, I determined to submit myself to the craft of woodworking. Without any significant background in shopwork, without substantive prior knowledge or experience, I threw myself headlong into luthiery (stringed instrument construction), which could fairly be described as the deep end of wood-shaping precision and meticulousness. Thanks to youthful zeal and naivete, I had no idea about what I was getting myself into.
In God’s providence, I had excellent instructors who not only introduced me to my tools and materials, but also nurtured my growth through demonstration and mentorship. Under their guidance, I learned how to face my own inabilities and pay attention to the cutting action of the tools. Their instruction in edge-jointing a soundboard or setting the tapered-sliding-dovetail neck joint were clear enough to be sure, but walking back to my bench, I quickly learned that knowledge is not transmitted through passive osmosis. It must be acquired through practice.
Thinking back on that time, I would describe the apprenticeship process as largely painful. I learned a lot, but none of it came easy. This is why it was to my astonishment that I completed that program strumming a 12-string acoustic guitar that I had made with my own two hands. Since that day, I have lived happily ever after as a master craftsman, daily creating wooden marvels in my enchanted little workshop.
Hardly.
Fresh out of graduation, sitting and staring at that guitar, I realized more than ever that even after developing all that hard-won know-how, I had barely begun to understand the art of working wood. The guitar was merely my initiation. I felt I was being called into a pursuit of something much greater. There was a whole craft tradition that offered to teach me another way to take up with the world.
It seemed to me that God was calling me to a life of craftsmanship—a humbling and formative engagement with the cosmos as he has given it. This is not the way of convenience or efficiency. Nor is it a guaranteed shortcut to riches or prestige. It is mostly a call to callouses. To splinters and mis-cuts. But the workbench calls those anointed to it as the sea calls its sailors.¹
Skill is Wisdom
Any craftsman who attentively reads the Pentateuch will eventually become transfixed by the account of the tabernacle’s construction. For those of us accustomed to think of God’s work neatly cordoned off from the physical realm, let us remind ourselves of the narrative:
Then Moses said to the people of Israel, “See, the LORD has called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; and he has filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, with intelligence, with knowledge, and with all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold and silver and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, for work in every skilled craft. And he has inspired him to teach, both him and Oholiab the son of Ahisamach of the tribe of Dan. He has filled them with skill to do every sort of work done by an engraver or by a designer or by an embroiderer in blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen, or by a weaver—by any sort of workman or skilled designer. (Ex 35:30-35)
And the craft skill (chokmah) that God gave was not restricted to these two foremen, Bezalel and Oholiab. We read that it was extended to “every craftsman in whose mind the LORD had put skill, everyone whose heart stirred him up to come to do the work.” (Ex 36:2)
Psalm 107 mentions the chokmah of another trade completely unrelated to the wood, stone, metal, and weaving work of the tabernacle construction. In this psalm, the expert seamen who knew well the ways of the deep (it was their business, after all) were confronted with the wondrous and terrifying works of God. His stormy wind lifted the waves and crashed them down upon the sailors. Their courage vanished as they were brought to their “wits’ end.” The word translated “wit” is the same as “skill” in the tabernacle account above. There is a skill in navigating the waters of the deep, just as there is a skill in traversing the fibers of a board at the workbench.
Given these linguistic usages, some may find it surprising to learn that in Scriptural contexts outside of manual labor, chokmah is most often translated “wisdom.” Chokmah is the wisdom that was to distinguish the Israelites from the nations among whom they dwelt (Deut 4:6). It is what God gave to Solomon for ruling well (1 King 4:29) and what Solomon calls us to cultivate within ourselves (Prov 4:5-7). Thus, according to Scripture’s own vocabulary, manual skill is a form of embodied wisdom.
Coming to grips with the breadth of the linguistic uses of chokmah has enabled me to see how I might learn well from the work of my hands. We are taught in Ecclesiastes that wisdom/skill is the antithesis of a grasping at the world; only the fool attempts to “shepherd the wind” (Ecc 2:11). So, the pursuit of mastery is not the pursuit of sovereignty. No, the wind will continue to blow where it wishes. Skill is knowing how to properly align our sails to catch it. It is knowing how to carve with the grain, instead of against it.
And this boots-on-the-ground know-how can be cultivated only through embodied, habitual practice. It comes from trying your hand at it and paying attention. It comes from capsizing in the water and from grain tearing out. The wise man gets up, learns from the experience, and has another go, confident that the Lord will help him (Prov 24:16).
As I continued on in my woodworking career, moving from guitars to furniture, I found myself wanting a deeper engagement with the craft—to truly know the grain and to have a serious command of my tools. I was no longer content to stand at a machine—I wanted to find a way to use hand tools effectively. I discovered that the extant shop records of the pre-industrial era universally attest to the incredible speed and efficiency of the craftsmen. These guys knew their stuff, and I wanted to learn from them. I began studying pre-industrial furniture making: sizing stock with handsaws, planing boards with wooden-bodied handplanes, and turning wood on a foot-powered lathe. Think Colonial Williamsburg, but without the puffy sleeves.
As I encountered challenge after challenge at the bench, I realized that I had in fact discovered a fruitful path of endless engagement. In 2015, this undertaking blossomed into a biannual publication called Mortise & Tenon Magazine, which “exists to cultivate reverence for the dignity of humanity and the natural world through the celebration of handcraft.” M&T is an exploration of old-school craftsmanship, not for the sake of craft repristination, but as a way of offering 21st-century readers one possible counterpractice that might offset the liabilities of the “device paradigm” in which we find ourselves.²
Christ’s disciples, of all people, should know that we cannot simply outsource our lives away; wisdom requires personal involvement with the world, and no, there is not an app for that. Living a full life, one that is embedded in the entanglement of personal relationships and the mundane exigencies of vocation, is fraught with opportunities for failure. And if we are going to avoid falling flat on our face the next time around, wisdom teaches us to pay attention. Consider the ant—sit awhile and take note of her intrinsic motivation; she’s not merely shuffling papers when the boss happens to stroll through (Prov 6:6-8). Ask the birds—they’ll tell you who’s in control of all things (Job 12:7). Observe the superfluous beauty of the flowers of the field (Matt 6:29-30); their gracefulness shows us God’s kindness, Calvin says (Institutes 3.10.2). By attentive engagement with the world, we learn more about ourselves, other creatures, and especially our Triune God.
Apprenticed to Wisdom
I believe that one way to account for the connection of craft skill to life wisdom is to appreciate the revelatory function of creation. God made the world as a plain and clear revelation of himself. He’s made his presence so obvious that one would have to be pretty hardhearted not to see him in every created thing (Rom 1:19-21). The heavens manifestly declare his glory. The sky, the day, and the night do not need to be translated into any tongue, because their God-exalting voices are clearly heard in every corner of creation (Ps 19:1-4). “[T]he works of creation and providence, do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God,” so reads the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF 1.1).
Augustine taught us to look for “traces of the Trinity” (Vestigia Trinitatis) in the things that God has made. Herman Bavinck similarly wrote in Reformed Dogmatics that “In the light of Scripture, both creation and providence also exhibit traces of God’s threefold existence . . . Christians, equipped with the spectacles of Scripture, see God in everything and everything in God.”³ When biblically literate, God’s children, through engagement with creation and providence, come to know more fully their Triune God. They become apprentices under the paideia of the Master Craftsman, the carpenter from Nazareth who is the eternal Wisdom of God (Prov 8:22-31, Lk 11:49, Mt 23:34).
Not every theological reflection on the goodness of work emphasizes this relational component. The most recent iteration of the “work and faith” movement, for all its positive elements, tends to focus most intently on the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion.” This is a commendable emphasis that sluggards and pop-level Platonists alike need to be reminded of. But the emphasis on “go out and shape the world for the glory of God” can at times eclipse a more fundamental good of manual work: beholding the glory of God in the things that he has made.
Our work shapes the world, yes. And it also shapes us. But this work is not work for its own sake. It is an attending to God through the particulars of the task at hand. Man is not homo faber; he is homo liturgicus.
In this light, it seems to me that what Richard Baxter has said about scientific study applies equally as well to the manual arts
[N]ature must be read as one of God’s books, which is purposely written for the revelation of himself. The Holy Scripture is the easier book: when you have first learned from it God, and his will, as to the most necessary things, address yourselves to the study of his works, and read every creature as a Christian and a divine. If you see not yourselves, and all things, as living, and moving, and having being in God, you see nothing, whatever you think you see. If you perceive not, in your study of the creatures, that God is all, and in all, and that ‘of him, and through him, and to him, are all things,’ you may think, perhaps, that you ‘know something; but you know nothing as you ought to know.’ Think not so basely of your physics, and of the works of God, as that they are only preparatory studies for boys. It is a most high and noble part of holiness, to search after, behold admire, and love the great Creator in all his works. How much have the saints of God been employed in this high and holy exercise! The book of Job, and the Psalms, may show us that our physics are not so little kin to theology as some suppose.⁴
Lifelong cultivation of skill is a humbling pursuit because success comes not through one victory heaped upon another, but it comes through the struggles of daily practice. In choosing the path of engagement we will find that the wisdom to see the world rightly comes only through callouses. The discipline of discipleship is a pressing through those struggles to more fully know that which is worth knowing fully.
Notes:
Adapted from Bruce Thielemann’s oft-quoted description of preaching: “There is no special honor in preaching, there is only special pain. The pulpit calls those anointed to it as the sea calls its sailors. And like the sea, it batters and bruises and does not rest. To preach, to really preach, is to die naked a little at a time and to know each time you do it that you must do it again.”
Albert Borgmann has explained that contemporary life can be characterized as operating within a “device paradigm,” in which devices procure commodities for the sake of our disburdenment. The liability of this arrangement, he says, is that it “makes no demand on our skill, strength, or attention,” which in turn opens the door to a disengagement with life. Refer to Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 321, 342. For more on Bavinck’s use of the Vestigia Trinitatis concept, see James Eglinton, Trinity and Organism: Towards a New Reading of Herman Bavinck’s Organic Motif (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 131-154.
Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 59.