Just today, I found myself stepping through mounds of ensilage piled against the stanchions in a barn. The door to the manure-filled pen would no longer close. The barn had shifted over all these years, and the door was sticking on the concrete sill. I put hay on the manure around the door and knelt with a saw trying to cut the bottom of the door by half an inch. At first, I didn’t want to do it, but there I was, caught in the motion of sawing horizontally. I could hear the cows chewing as I entered the rhythm, watching the saw’s teeth rip further and further across the bottom of the door. And though wood cannot feel—at least not as we feel, or so we think—when pushing the saw faster than it could easily cut, I felt violent. When backing off and letting the saw glide in its own stroke, I felt so inside the sensation of sawing a door free that I suddenly felt the effort of others, in other times, sawing other doors free. Within minutes, I was so thoroughly sawing the bottom of this barn door that I could have been a carpenter planing Solomon’s gate.

The day’s earthiness returned, though it had never disappeared. As I stood, my knees were wet with manure and the door swung freely over a sliver of daylight through which the wind was now curling. I wondered if that sheet of air would chill the cows. I was amazed at how much light that cut sliver of wood let in.

It made me wonder: How do we shift over the years? How are our foundations eaten away? When beaten by the weather of living, how rough are we in the opening? And what then is the saw but the work of honest love: kneeling in our own manure or the manure of others, holding the broken gate firmly, and letting our honesty rip its stroke across the bottom of our door; till a sliver of light pours through, even when our door is closed; till we know ourselves by what shines through us.