A bearded man in blue coveralls is building a wall around the garden outside my window. It’s a low wall, about a meter high, miraculously taking shape as one rough stone is laid upon another. The man seems oblivious to his surroundings: a bucolic valley in the Vercors region of south-central France, where the tall green hills rising around us flow south and east to merge with the towering Alps.
On the high ground behind this renovated 18th century farm house there sits an Orthodox chapel. Its interior is filled with splendid frescos and finely carved wooden furniture. A sculpted iconostasis of white marble casts the reflected light of myriad candles into the darker recesses of the nave. The local resident community is made up of a priest and his family, whose common ministry consists in welcoming individuals and groups for training in the sacred arts of icon painting, mosaics and wood carving. This afternoon a couple of neighbors are volunteering their time to work in an atelier downstairs. For several weeks now they have been fashioning intricate mosaic slabs to replace the worn carpet that presently covers the chapel floor. While they work in near total silence, I quietly watch this fellow build his wall.
A pile of stones, gathered from surrounding fields, is scattered in the grass behind him. He picks one up, turns it several times to find the flattest surface, then with a hammer chips away a protruding edge. Taking up a trowel, he scoops wet cement from a wheelbarrow, smoothes a layer onto the wall’s upper surface, then sets the stone in place. He taps it a few times with the butt end of the trowel, checks the height against a marked stake, then steps back to assess his work. Satisfied, he turns to select another stone. As he does so, his right hand, with fingers clasped to thumb, comes up to his forehead. Simply, discreetly, he makes the sign of the cross. He’s a local paysan, an Orthodox Christian, and his work belongs to God. Appropriately, significantly, his name is Emmanuel, “God with us.”
Every stone he selects is blessed by that same holy gesture. He has no idea he’s being observed. Anyway, it wouldn’t matter. He’s a stone mason, the keeper of a vanishing tradition, and his life’s work is above all to build walls. Unlike some fences, his walls are not to “make good neighbors,” but to glorify both God and the earth. As he blesses those stones, he blesses all of creation.
We activists, city-people or not, spend most of our time, it seems, trying to produce, trying to accomplish something we and others will consider worthwhile. A “life worth living”—even in the Church—is usually seen as a life of great achievements. We admire and even envy those who rise through the ecclesiastical ranks, or publish an impressive number of books, or make their voice heard with authority in the halls of academia or via web lists and chat rooms. We devote hours, days and years to discovering and realizing our “PIL,” our purpose in life. Yet most of us never quite find it, never quite feel satisfied with our lot or what we’ve done with it. So eventually we burn out from frustration, or get divorced, or seek a transfer: a “geographic cure” that heals nothing. And all the time the message drones in our mind: “God, like other people, will judge us on the basis of our accomplishments.” Today’s most poignant existential question is not whether “to be,” but rather “to do or not to do?” Yet paradoxically, more is accomplished by being than by doing. At least more that’s worthwhile.
Right now Emmanuel is hosing water into a slowly revolving cement mixer. The wall he’s building is purely decorative. It serves no real purpose at all, other than to rim the garden with something beautiful. He has spent his life creating walls like this, and he’ll most likely go on doing so until his muscles are too weak to lift up the heavy stones and his frame too withered to move the cement-filled barrow.
Until then, though, he’ll continue to bless creation itself with every stone he selects. His efforts, rhythmic and repetitive, will go on producing works of ageless, natural beauty. And some day, in God’s good time, he will die—having led a simple, quiet and blessed life that was truly worth living.