Commentary
We live in an old house, my family and I. Its beauty and craftsmanship are a marvel to behold.
Sometimes in the morning, as I sit in an armchair in the entrance hall, reading a passage from Scripture or “The Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers,” a particular detail of the hand-carved woodwork catches my eye. I begin to think of the men, back in the early 1880s, who spent a year or two pouring their hearts and souls into every element of its construction, from the elaborately designed oak and maple floors to the stunning front staircase to the twin 10-foot tall stained-glass windows on the landing between the first and second stories.
And sometimes my thoughts go deeper, to those who made the exquisite glazed tiles that surround five of our seven fireplaces and those who dug the red clay out of Midwestern riverbeds and fired the bricks for our 40-foot-high chimneys. I think of those who harvested the trees that went into the woodwork and doors and turned sand from the shores of the Great Lakes into the jewels that adorn the stained-glass windows.
And then I glance up as the morning light strikes those windows from outside and the jewels catch fire; tinted beams play on the banister of the staircase and bring out the grain of the wood. I am suddenly grateful for the dedication and craftsmanship of men I never met who — when they were building this house for Julius Dick and his wife in 1882 — knew nothing of Scott and Amy Richert, their eight children and their one grandchild who would someday live, laugh, cry, fight and reconcile and, through it all, love one another in these halls and rooms of the most architecturally original home on North Jefferson Street in Huntington, Indiana.
And yet most of the time I walk those same halls, distracted by my thoughts and my worries and my phone, and no detail of the woodwork catches my eye. All of this beauty fades into the background, and my awareness of those who created it gets pushed to the edge of my consciousness and beyond as I retreat into the narrow horizons of myself.
I walk out the back door, into that same sunlight that sets the jewels in the stained glass on fire, and pay it no heed as I set forth on my daily trek to the headquarters of Our Sunday Visitor.
As I walk past oaks and maples, distant grandnephews perhaps of the trees that gave their lives to provide me with floors to walk on and carved staircases to climb, birds flit from one to the next and squirrels jump from branch to branch. Still, my eyes stare down at the sidewalk in front of me rather than up at the beauty of a world that was, unlike our house, crafted with me and my family in mind.
“Let there be light … Let the earth bring forth vegetation … Let birds fly beneath the dome of the sky … Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness.”
Everywhere we look, all that surrounds us — everything that the sunlight strikes and even the sun and the light itself — was made for us by someone other than us. It all therefore speaks silently yet resoundingly of its creator, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear and a moment to pause to contemplate the beauty and the craftsmanship of our common home.
Scott P. Richert is publisher for OSV.
